If you are trying to grow a technology firm, you might tend to focus on potential locations like Silicon Valley, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Maryland’s I-270 Corridor, Austin, Texas, the suburbs of Boston or the side streets of New York. Here’s another possibility – Canada. The Wall Street Journal reports that Canada is offering massive economic incentives to technology companies, in one case paying nearly 80 percent of the cost of engineers for a firm working on a new kind of wearable technology.
Last year, Cisco signed an agreement with the government of Ontario pledging up to $4 billion in investment over the next decade in exchange for $220 million in incentives. Today, seven of the 10 largest technology companies in the world maintain outposts in Canada, including Google, Siemens and IBM. But those are big companies. If you’re a startup, there are plenty of incentives, but there’s also s a catch. To receive all potential benefits, you have to become Canadian sort of. Your company must be majority controlled residents of Canada. Otherwise, companies are only eligible for portions of available economic development incentives.