Although business English is a major branch of ESP, published reports showing how business English learners' needs were first identified and then addressed are rare, and even rarer are reports illustrating how existing research can inform needs analysis and syllabus design. The present paper proposes a research-informed approach to curriculum development for specific business English topics. It illustrates the approach by reporting the key stages in the curriculum development process, namely, needs analysis, syllabus design, course implementation and course evaluation. Specifically, it shows how the curriculum development of a module on business meetings for undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong was informed by both the findings from an in-house needs analysis and insights from existing research, in particular, studies related to business English discourse and second language pedagogy. This research-informed approach to identifying and addressing needs helped to determine the linguistic content of the module and to derive a pedagogical model for the topic of business meetings. Data from course evaluations and learners' reflections show the effectiveness of the module. The approach to curriculum development illustrated in this paper can be applied to other ESP topics. It is recommended that more topic-specific, research-informed curriculum innovations in ESP be published to strengthen the link between research and curriculum development. •A topic-specific, research-informed approach to ESP curriculum design is proposed.•Existing research and an in-house needs analysis informed a module on meetings.•Linguistic and pedagogical research was consulted and applied to the module design.•The module entailed experiential learning, reflection and language focus/feedback.•The paper shows the value of topic-specific reports on ESP curriculum development.