The Industrial R&D Internship (IRDI) program aims at creating opportunities for skilled graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to solve private-sector challenges and gain valuable industry experience by linking them with businesses that foster and use their talents. As a result, the program increases the S&T orientation of businesses and creates new opportunities for highly qualified personnel.

The IRDI program’s goal is to introduce 1,000 internships per year. Targeting all academic disciplines, the program, which began in 2007, supports collaborative projects involving graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, their supervising professors, and industry partners. Companies share the cost of hosting the interns, with additional funding obtained from provincial, academic, and other partners.

The IRDI is delivered by ACCELERATE Canada, a not-for-profit consortium of 17 organizations from across all disciplines including social sciences and health. The program gives graduate students and postdoctoral fellows the opportunity to deal with an industry problem hands-on, and to find solutions to the benefit of the organization. The firms derive the benefit of having a highly skilled intern with research knowledge and experience.

Impacts of the IRDI program

The IRDI program has provided for over 1,000 internships across Canada in the past two years and going forward is expected to support up to 1,000 internships annually.
Of the industry partners who participated in a project completion survey, 96% stated that the research advances, techniques or tools developed during internships would be used by their organization. In fact, many internships were directly linked to commercialization of a product or process.

2011 Competition for the Industrial Research and Development Internship (IRDI) program