Rona Ambrose, Minister of Public Works and Government Services, and Christian Paradis, Minister of Natural Resources, have announced the government has pre-qualified its first 19 innovations for the Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program (CICP).
The CICP is a $40 million program created by the federal government to help businesses commercialize innovative products and services.
Public Works and Government Services is working with government departments to match innovations with the right test departments, and will be negotiating with the selected companies to test their products.
Richmond’s MDA Systems Ltd. was the only B.C. company to receive assistance with its automated motion imagery exploitation software to generate geo-registered products for surveillance and reconnaissance from airborne video.
The CICP procurement strategy for the first call for proposals included two evaluation stages. The first stage involved an independent review and ranking of proposals by the National Research Council Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP).
The second stage involved an innovation selection committee that validated the NRC-IRAP’s rankings. Members of this committee, of which 70% were from the private sector, were chosen based on their experience in investment and entrepreneurship, knowledge of innovation and commercialization trends and expertise in international business practices.