Of course, no discussion of TA would be complete without talking about “novelty”. Novelty is what the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) refers to when we make an argument that a certain chunk of work must be a technological advancement because that work entailed doing something that has never been done or attempted before.
The first response to such claims is generally … so what? It is possible to seek or achieve a commercially unique result using purely known technologies and standard approaches, and without addressing a single technological uncertainty. The CRA’s position on the novelty argument is that originality is not necessarily the same thing as technical innovation.
Still, just because a thing is novel, that doesn’t make it ineligible either – it’s just that the argument, by itself, doesn’t gain you much traction for your claim. Further clouding the issue, it is common for the novelty argument to be linked, at the same time, with advancements that are based on commercial progress, with features and functionality presented in a commercial sense rather than at the level of the underlying technology. The two issues often pop up together and it becomes necessary to sort out two tangled misapprehensions instead of just one. Having first restored a focus on the technology discussion, it then becomes possible to explore the novelty issue from a technology perspective. Exploration is definitely necessary.
Although novelty may not be the definitive argument for technological advancement, it does offer intriguing possibilities, and may well be an indicator of possible SR&ED. I suspect that most science reviewers confronted with this argument would probably wish to say something like, “Yes, yes – it’s neat what you did. Now can you tell me why and how you did it, and what problems you encountered, at a technology level?”
If a thing has never been done before, the question you need to ask is, “why not”? Is there some technological uncertainty (TU) about the attempt? Has nobody ever tried to do it? Or have lots of people tried and failed in various ways? (If lots of people have tried and failed, there is presumably good evidence for the existence of technological uncertainty.) Moreover, a lack of generally available knowledge may well form a part of the TUs confronted in such a project.
Proprietary knowledge is not “generally available”, and is not commonly disclosed to the technical staff of a company that is trying to use a given technology. Where the novelty argument truly exists, at a technology level, it would not prove startling or uncommon for the required technology information to be either unavailable, or not widely known. To make such a claim, you need to explain where and in what respects the needed knowledge was lacking, and what you had to do, experimentally, to overcome the problem. You still have to talk about technological uncertainties and about experimental development work that was done to address them and to pursue the advancement.
It’s a matter of moving from “so what?” to “and then what?” and of understanding that novelty is not so much proof of an advancement as it is another indicator of technological uncertainty.
Where the new or novel thing actually does represent a technological advance, because you have addressed technological uncertainties through experimental means, then there should be eligible work.