At Catalyst R&D, we talk a lot about the importance of Competent Professional (CP) to Competent Professional conversations and with good reason. When engineers, scientists, and technical specialists can speak directly with someone who genuinely understands their field, it makes the process so much easier and more efficient. It’s not just about speaking the same language. It’s about being able to explore the detail of the work. The technical decisions, the iterations and the uncertainties, all without needing to pause and explain every term or concept. These conversations are where the real value of an R&D claim often starts to emerge.
Peer-to-Peer Understanding Unlocks Clarity
In most R&D discussions, the technical detail is where things quickly become difficult for non-specialists to follow. For an experienced technical expert, though, this is where the dialogue becomes most productive. When you can discuss a project at a peer level, engineer to engineer, or scientist to scientist, the process is going beyond information gathering. It explores the thinking, testing, and problem-solving that drove the innovation, and that’s the most productive way to identify that genuine technical uncertainty existed, not just where changes happened, but where new knowledge and capabilities were being developed. That creates a robust foundation for a credible R&D claim.
But there’s another, often-overlooked advantage that comes from having really experienced technical expertise in your process.
Experience Brings Perspective and Perspective Finds Value
An experienced technical expert doesn’t just understand the technical detail; they know when to step back from it. They can look at a project from a different perspective, questioning assumptions, reframing challenges, and recognising opportunities that those immersed in the day-to-day work may not have seen. It’s important to have that broader perspective which often transforms how a project is viewed for R&D purposes.
A Real Conversation That Changed the Outcome
During a recent project review, one client described how they had modified a structural component by switching to a new alloy and were getting unexpected vibration harmonics when the rotating blades they were developing reached a certain load. On the surface, it sounded like standard optimisation, possibly fine-tuning for better performance. But because our Director and Principal Engineer Mike had seen equivalent challenges before in his career, he understood exactly what was being described. So, he asked:
“When you switched to the new alloy, didn’t you have to recalibrate the dynamic stiffness in the finite element model? That would have changed the boundary conditions and if you had to resolve that experimentally, that’s a genuine system-level uncertainty.”
The engineer, the client’s Competent Professional, considered this and confirmed:
“Yes, actually, that’s exactly what we struggled with. We assumed that was just part of optimisation, but now that you say it, it really was something we couldn’t predict from existing knowledge.”
That simple exchange reframed that part of the project. What they’d viewed as routine design work actually involved resolving technological uncertainties that met HMRC’s criteria for R&D. Because we were speaking engineer to engineer, we uncovered eligible activities and costs that would otherwise have been missed and simultaneously strengthened the overall claim in the process.
Why Most R&D Checklists Miss the Point
Every R&D guide tells you to document technical uncertainty. But here’s what they don’t say: engineers rarely describe their work using the language of ‘uncertainty.’ They say things like ‘we had to figure out,’ ‘it kept failing until,’ or ‘we couldn’t predict.’ If your claim process requires engineers to translate their work into HMRC language, you’re filtering out precisely the insights that meet the guidelines and make claims defensible.
Why This Matters
The ability to step back, question, and reframe a project isn’t just about ticking boxes. It’s about seeing innovation from multiple angles. That’s the real value of involving experienced technical professionals in the R&D process. They don’t just capture what’s obvious; they uncover what’s important. And in doing so, they often identify expenditure and qualifying work that would otherwise go unclaimed.
The uncomfortable truth? The difference between a good claim and a great one often isn’t spending more time preparing the claim. It’s asking better questions. Which raises one for you: who in your process is asking these searching questions?