Innovation Saskatchewan

Innovation Saskatchewan supports the growth of innovative businesses and research to create jobs and diversify Saskatchewan’s economy. One of the ways they do that is through the Saskatchewan Technology Startup Incentive (STSI): a program designed to attract early-stage investment by offering Saskatchewan based investors a non-refundable 45% tax credit when they back eligible technology startups.

As the program matured, participation grew quickly, surpassing 410 investors and startups, and the operating model that once worked at a smaller scale started to show its limits. The back-end of the experience relied heavily on spreadsheets and local document storage, with staff manually routing information between forms, folders, and stakeholders. It was time-consuming, hard to audit, and increasingly exposed the program to clerical errors and data integrity issues. Around the same time, the program’s capital cap expanded from $3.5M to $7M, increasing demand for processing and issuing of tax credit certificates. The risk was clear: without a modern system, the program’s success would continue to amplify administrative burden.

The result was a secure web application and administrative dashboard that replaced manual spreadsheets with structured, workflow-driven program management. Purpose-built forms now support every core submission type—startup applications, investment applications, annual returns, and tax credit certificate requests—paired with clear status tracking and administrative review tools. Program staff can find, filter, review, and manage companies, investors, annual returns, and approvals in one place, supported by automated email notifications and generated outputs such as tax credit PDFs. Where the previous process depended on coordination and memory, the new platform makes progress visible, consistent, and far easier to manage.

Just as important, the platform was designed for iteration. After the core workflows shipped, enhancements extended the system’s durability: administrators can request changes on submitted applications, authorized users can manage access and roles, and annual report notifications can be tracked directly in the system, reducing follow-up effort while strengthening governance.

In under four months, Innovation Saskatchewan moved from an unscalable manual process to a modern digital foundation, automating 90% of the former workflow and launching on time (slightly early). The STSI program now has a platform built to support ongoing growth, with cleaner data, fewer handoffs, and a stronger operational backbone for one of Saskatchewan’s most important early-stage innovation incentives.