Interpreting that is my least favourite part of the R&D tax incentive - as far as I'm concerned practically everything has an unknown outcome. I can't figure out what we're doing in software and sometimes that even stretches to include after a product has been built. Most ideas have been had before in some form or another - it is just nobody at this company knows about it.

But genuine R&D would look very similar. There isn't a good test to distinguish "I don't know how to do this thing" from "nobody knows how to do this thing". I don't have the time, resources or inclination to know what everyone else knows. And then having to second guess what the tax office thinks everyone knows, because I know they'd accept some of the things I'm doing as research. It just isn't clear where they think the line is.