About
A Working Session, Not a Webinar
Invention Cafe® is a Swanson Reed initiative that brings founders, finance leaders, R&D teams, and advisers together with specialists in R&D tax and innovation. Through regular sessions across Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States, participants can work through real claims, practical challenges, and current innovation-policy questions.
Innovation matters to every business, but the environment around it is constantly changing. Tax rules evolve, grant programmes open and close, and documentation and substantiation requirements can change as legislation and guidance develop. Invention Cafe® gives businesses a practical space to understand these changes, share experiences, and work through the issues with others facing similar decisions.
You don’t need to be an R&D tax specialist to benefit from a session. The workshops are designed for people who lead, manage, or support research and innovation, including founders and business owners, finance and tax leaders, R&D and engineering managers, accountants, and professional advisers.
What Makes It Different
- Small groups, not a lecture hall: everyone in the room gets to ask their own question.
- Real project questions, not generic slideware: attendees work through claims and problems they actually have.
- Direct interaction with the specialists preparing the claim, not just a presenter on a stage.
Three Pillars, One Conversation
Each event is built around three connected ideas that also shape how Swanson Reed helps a business turn its research into a supportable claim. The pillars set the focus for a session; the Café LATTE method below sets the structure for the discussion itself.
Productivity
Getting more useful output from the same research effort: measuring the things that matter, cutting the friction between an idea and a trial, and keeping good work from stalling in a queue.
Commercialisation
Moving a result out of the lab or the prototype shop and into a product, a customer and a defensible tax position. Most R&D value is lost in this gap, not in the science.
Innovation Culture
The leadership, incentives and everyday habits that make a team keep asking sharper questions, and keep acting on the answers when it would be easier not to.
The Café LATTE Method
The discussion part of every session follows a simple sequence. It is not a framework to memorise. It is just the order that tends to produce a useful conversation instead of a circular one.
- L
Listen
Gather input from across the business and from customers before deciding what to change.
- A
Ask
Turn problems into better questions: the ones that expose an opportunity rather than just a complaint.
- T
Trust
Build trust so people can share honest feedback and useful information.
- T
Timing
Introduce changes at a pace the organisation and market can realistically absorb.
- E
Evolve
Treat improvement as continuous rather than a project with an end date.
inventionINDEX & the Ideas That Come Out of the Room
The ideas and insights shared during each workshop continue beyond the session. They are brought together through inventionINDEX, an ongoing collaboration that gathers input from attendees across different cities and turns those insights into a submission focused on improving innovation policy and the incentives that support it.
Learn more about the R&D Tax Incentive that the programme works alongside.
About inventionINDEX Collaboration →Answers at a Glance
- What actually happens at an Invention Cafe® session?
- A short, practical briefing from Swanson Reed specialists and invited speakers, followed by a facilitated discussion where attendees work through their own questions: eligibility, documentation, how a rule applies to a specific project. Sessions run from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM at every location. They are deliberately small and conversation-led rather than lecture-style.
- Who is it for?
- Founders and owners, finance and tax leaders, R&D and engineering managers, and the accountants and advisers who support them. You do not need to be an R&D tax specialist to get value from a session: the format is built for people who run or fund the research, not just those who claim it.
- Who runs it?
- Invention Cafe® is an initiative of Swanson Reed, a specialist R&D tax advisory firm operating in the United States and Australia. Swanson Reed also publishes the R&D tax case-law database at rdtaxcases.com.
Ready to Find a Session?
See the full 2027 schedule and find a workshop near you.
Explore the 2027 Workshops