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.

MITACS-Accelerate connects businesses with graduate and postdoctoral students who apply their specialized skills to real-world research challenges. Students have the opportunity to translate their skills from theory into practice, while businesses gain a competitive advantage by accessing high-quality research expertise. For more information, visit www.mitacsaccelerate.ca .

Connect Canada is a national, five-year, federally funded internship program that links Canadian companies with graduate students for research placements in the manufacturing, green technology and other key economic sectors. Regardless of location, Connect Canada interns apply the latest in research methods to a company’s most pressing research and development (R&D) issues. Companies gain a cost-effective way to leverage research budgets and in-house capabilities, while interns gain practical industry experience that enhances their graduate studies. Connect Canada is managed by AUTO21 Inc. and the University of Windsor Centre for Career Education, and its $5 million budget is funded through the Government of Canada’s Industrial R&D Internships program. Please visit www.connectcanadainternships.ca.

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.