Ignition Insights

Sizing, installing and grid-connecting solar and storage is engineering. Where on-site hybrid integration and controls may become eligible R&D instead.

Wiring a commercial LLM into a workflow is rarely the R&D. Under the R&DTI the experiment is the reliability property you could not predict in advance.

Building the engine is implementation. A core R&D activity may sit in whether your historical job records can predict labour hours to a defined measure.

Complying with statutory requirements or standards is excluded from core R&D. Fintech eligibility survives where achievable performance was unknown.

In a consolidated group the head company claims. In an R&D partnership each partner registers separately. A JV depends on what it actually is.

You generally can't claim the purchase price of R&D equipment. You claim its decline in value for the R&D use — then a balancing adjustment on disposal.

Exploration drilling is an excluded core activity. What mining and METS companies can claim usually sits downstream — in processing, recovery and autonomy.

Season-long vineyard and paddock trials can be eligible R&D — but only where the outcome was genuinely unknown and the work was designed as an experiment.

Defence and space suppliers often develop under a funded contract. Whether the R&DTI is available turns on the at-risk rule and who the R&D was for.