What This Guide Is and How to Use It
NOTE: Every Growth by Design Cheatsheet is designed to be read by itself, or copied into your LLM of choice to train your chat on supporting you through the application process. Copy away.
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Every year, hundreds of millions in government innovation funding goes unused while founders across Canada talk about the lack of capital.
The problem isn’t availability — it’s accessibility.
IRAP, the Industrial Research Assistance Program, runs a $500 million annual budget to fund R&D, prototyping, and commercialization across Canadian tech. Yet utilization often hovers around 50%. That means half of the money set aside to fund innovation never reaches the companies actually building it.
This guide is written to fix that gap.
IRAP gives founders two main paths to access non-dilutive funding:
R&D and product development projects (standard IRAP funding)
Commercialization and go-to-m…
