When I say full bore SR&ED, I mean an all-out, fully committed effort across your organization. For a company of any size, it requires a paradigm shift, from “prospecting” to “mining”, and a level of process integration that is extremely difficult to achieve.
Most companies introduce or launch SR&ED, initially, as a kind of prospecting activity. By this I mean that one or more people are assigned to the task of sifting through the evidence of day to day operations, looking for the glint of some promising work and the evidence to support it. Eventually, if promising work is found, and a few successful claims are made over time, it becomes apparent to the senior leadership that there’s real potential in the SR&ED program.
Suddenly, there is an appetite for the development of a formal, extensive and optimized exploitation of the SR&ED opportunity. The challenge now arises – what approaches are best to move forward to full-bore SR&ED exploitation. What are the necessary conditions for success within a large company? If you don’t have a large company, are there any “best practices” that you can still adopt for a small to medium sized business, to avoid later growing pains?
A critical distinction exists, and must be maintained, between the body of work that is done to accomplish the objectives of a business project, and the experimental work that is performed, within that project or several projects, specifically to overcome a technological uncertainty or to pursue an incremental technological advancement: which is the SR&ED. Then there is the work that is “directly in support”, which is added to the claim.
To be continued...
Bruce Madole