I've heard vague tales of Canadian companies receiving tax incentives to do research, in the form of SR&ED credits. (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/menu-eng.html)
Does anyone have any concrete experience with the program?
Does anyone have any concrete experience with the program?
What I know as a dev : My company pays an outside firm specialized in getting R&D credits for companies. I don't really know how much it costs and how much it brings in. Every quarter, all the devs have to sit down and do a kind of interview with a guy from that firm. We're a pretty standard SaaS platform so it's hard to really know what can be considered R&D from my point of view. During the interview, we go over our work for the last quarter and dig into areas that could potentially be considered R&D. We'll explain in details what are the technical challenges, how what we're doing is different than what's already available out there, if we did prototyping, research, user testing, etc... Then they write up a nice report and try to get us as much R&D credit as they can!
You can get help from third parties, but they take a big chunk of the money and they just make the process a little bit easier.