Technology vs. Technological, What’s The Difference?
These two words, “technology” and “technological” sound almost the same yet they are ever so different in the SR&ED program!
The easiest way to understand technology is to think of it as using existing knowledge and while you may manipulate what it does, you don’t manipulate how it works. This is not really SR&ED.
For example, you buy some equipment (someone else’s technology) and then set it up. Perhaps the setup was not obvious for your application and you have to fiddle with it, but in the end you learned nothing more than how to set up the equipment for your particular needs.
Technological, on the other hand, is really getting into the guts of a technique or mechanism, understanding how it works, its limitations, and trying to manipulate how it works so that you get what you want. You experiment with different approaches, see why they fail, and in so doing, understand the problem and mechanisms better so that you can offer new ways of doing things. Now you have created new knowledge.
For example, after fiddling with the new equipment you have purchased, you find that it is not capable of meeting your requirements, but you think you may be able to modify it to work differently. You try different modifications, and develop a new or modified mechanism that eventually meets your needs. That sounds a lot like SR&ED.
Once you can show some technological involvement, there is almost always technical involvement that can be claimed in association with the technological activities as support work.