Every dollar counts. This is especially true in the beginning stages of a business where opportunities are at every corner, but capital and resources are a bottleneck. Innovation is important to society. When it comes to financially supporting innovation, the Canadian government and other organizations actually do walk the walk. The following is a list of programs that may prove useful to you in lowering the cost of entrepreneurship and the acquisition of formal intellectual property rights.

Some Patent Offices will provide discounts for government fees to small businesses as an incentive to facilitate access to intellectual property protection. Depending on the size of your company, you may qualify for such discounts as a “Small Entity.” In this article, we discuss the qualifications required to be considered as one of these discounted entities in Canada and in the U.S.

A U.S. provisional patent application (“Provisional Patent”) is a temporary patent filing administered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). It does not itself mature into a patent that could be eventually granted, but it does establish an early priority date for an invention should you wish to later file a regular patent application.