NorthBridge Consultants’ Canadian Business Blog is dedicated to bringing businesses news and information to help companies identify and access the most appropriate government funding programs.

We offer opinions and insider information that can provide a pulse on government initiatives, the health of the Canadian economy, and firsthand thoughts from Canadian business owners.

10 Quick Tips: Holding Performance Reviews

Keep the review positive. While there may be some negative points to discuss, keeping the overall tone of the review positive will relieve a lot of possible tension after the review for the employee. Stick to a schedule. Whether it’s… Read more »

News In the Canadian Food Industry

There have been a couple of large items that have been happening in Canada’s food industry that I wanted to touch upon today. First of all, the federal government has decided to end the monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board.… Read more »

The Jenkins Report

A year ago, Tom Jenkins (chairman and chief strategy officer at Open Text Corp) was asked to lead a committee that was going to investigate how Canada can see better results from the money being spent on innovation in Canada.… Read more »

What’s wrong with RIM?

An aging smartphone line, an inability to break out of the corporate niche, and the lack of any new product innovation are widely perceived to be eroding RIM’s business and stagnating growth.  To achieve growth, many believed that RIM needed to… Read more »

August Survey of Manufacturing

Good news for Canadian manufacturers – according to StatsCan, manufacturing sales in August rose 1.4% to $47.6 billion. This is the highest level that manufacturing sales have been at since October 2008. A breakdown of some of the provinces is… Read more »

Open Source and Innovation

What exactly is “Open Source”? The open source production model is a model where the source materials for the end products are available to the public. In the case of software, where this term is mostly heard, it means that… Read more »

The CRA’s SR&ED Service Standards

The CRA released their average processing times for claims during the months of April 2011 through September 2011. Overall, it’s looking a lot better than it was previously – the total average numbers have all fallen since we last spoke… Read more »

What’s your biggest office pet peeve?

A survey done by LinkedIn and released today took a look at what people’s greatest pet peeves in the office are. Turns out the top five are: people not taking ownership of their actions constant complainers dirty common areas start… Read more »

In the News This Week…

In this article by Michael Scissons, we read about Why Canada is a hotbed of tech activity, including five factors that are unique to Canada in contributing to the innovative tech activity that is happening here. We have all heard… Read more »