After years sharing Ottawa’s top two spots on the ranking of Canada’s biggest research and development spenders, Shopify has overtaken Mitel as the capital’s top R&D investor in 2018.
Commerce giant Shopify moved up eight spots to No. 20 on Research Infosource’s latest annual ranking of Canada’s corporate R&D spenders, spending $176.6 million in fiscal 2017.
Mitel climbed one spot to land at No. 23 on this year’s list, ending its seven-year run as the top R&D spender headquartered in the National Capital Region. The Kanata-based telecom firm spent $135.7 million on R&D last year.
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Companies with sizeable R&D presences in Ottawa, including IBM Canada (No. 3), BlackBerry (No. 10) and Ericsson (No. 11), also ranked highly on the list. Other locally based companies noted were Lockheed Martin Canada (No. 52), Kinaxis (No. 69) and Espial Group (No. 80).
Top-ranking Bombardier outspent the next-closest Canadian company by nearly a billion dollars in fiscal 2017. The company invested $1.6 billion on R&D last year, compared with $677.9 million from the No. 2 firm, Magna International.


