The 5 Frascati criteria, explained simply

How do you know whether a project truly counts as R&D for tax purposes? The answer is in the OECD’s Frascati Manual, which defines five cumulative criteria. A project qualifies only if it meets them all. Here they are, jargon-free.

1 · Novelty

The project aims at new knowledge — not the mere application of known solutions. Reusing the state of the art isn’t enough; you must aim beyond it.

2 · Creativity

It rests on original concepts or hypotheses, non-obvious to a professional in the field. The approach, not just the result, must be inventive.

3 · Uncertainty

At the start, you don’t know whether it will work, nor how much time or resource it will take. This scientific or technical uncertainty is the heart of the CIR — the so-called “lock”.

4 · Systematic

The work is planned and budgeted: documented objectives, method, resources. A hallway hunch isn’t R&D; a traced protocol is.

5 · Transferability / reproducibility

Results can be reproduced and transferred. You must be able to record what was learned — including failures, which are fully part of R&D.

How to document it without losing sleep

These five criteria are proven with artefacts your teams already produce: tickets describing a lock, commits, experiment write-ups, protocols. TaxTraces automatically links each criterion to that evidence — and flags the ones still “to document” before you export the file.