The new allocation from the federal government’s flagship innovation fund will give money to projects that are fund collaborations between big firms, small businesses, academic institutions and non-profits, and accelerators and incubators. The government is not allocating any new funding for this stream. (The Logic)
Talking point: This is the first SIF stream for collaborations that does not have industry or subject-area restrictions; it also has no deadline. It’s similar to the SIF’s Stream 4, which allocated large sums of money to specific industries. Based on that precedent, successful Stream 5 projects are likely to receive big allocations from the fund. In May, Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains announced two $49-million awards for digital health projects under Stream 4: a Canada-wide data platform and a group working on image-guided therapies. That puts the projects tied in eighth place in terms of how much money they received among the fund’s 46 projects to date.