You can now get—or, at the very least, apply to get—market intelligence reports at no cost through the provincial Business Mentorship & Entrepreneurship Program (BMEP). The program is managed by MaRS in Toronto, which is where the research team is based, and the Communitech entrepreneur services team is the official contact point for the program within Waterloo Region.

If you're looking for market data to support a business plan or for technology validation, competitive analysis, or other purposes, it's just a matter of filling out a simple request form (which I can send you), and then I or one of our three executives-in-residence would go over it, just to make sure it looks complete and clear and then we would pass it along to the research team. They might request further clarifications, but if everything looks good to them, they will assign an analyst who will determine a search strategy and get back to you with the results.

It won't cost you anything, and they're trying to keep the turnaround time as short as possible, but that will depend on the number of requests they receive and other factors.

To use this service, just send an email to gary@communitech.ca">gary@communitech.ca and I'll send you a request form. (And, if you want to fix the glitch in our blog editor that screws up mailto links, you can let me know about that too!)