{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__sociology_anthropology","archetype_slug":"deadweight_loss_reduction","domain_slug":"sociology_anthropology","title":"Risk-Tiered Ethics Review for Minimal-Risk Ethnography","opportunity_summary":"Audit whether defined minimal-risk ethnography is delayed by misclassification and duplicative workflow, then conditionally test a sunsetted, independently triaged review path with escalation and protection safeguards. The existence, prevalence, and magnitude of avoidable delay remain hypotheses.","adopter_authorizer":"The university's legally and institutionally authorized research-ethics board, supported by ethics administrators and university research leadership and informed by affected communities.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Missing field seasons, community events, funding windows, training, and community collaboration could matter materially, but the packet provides no local prevalence, magnitude, or demonstrated forgone value."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"The proposal identifies researchers, students, communities, reviewers, leaders, funders, and partners as affected actors, but supplies no expressed demand, complaints, commitments, or willingness to adopt from any of them."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"Risk-tiered intake and streamlined routing offer a testable advantage over both ordinary review and added capacity if misclassification and duplication are binding; that causal wedge and the comparative benefit are unresolved."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The ethnography-specific workflow hypothesis is coherent, but prior art is explicitly unsearched and the packet provides no comparison with existing tiered, expedited, or ethnography-specific review models."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"A de-identified audit, eligibility rubric, independent triage, routing changes, escalation rules, monitoring, and automatic expiry are operationally plausible within a university, although reliable classification and thresholds still require development."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"The proposal identifies the authorized ethics board and preserves its control over eligibility, safeguards, suspension, and renewal. Adoption still depends on board approval, institutional coordination, and meaningful community input not yet demonstrated."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The packet supplies a defined protocol class, observable delays and rework, relevant controls, two comparators, falsifiers, exclusions, and a retrospective audit as a safe first step. Local data availability and outcome definitions are unconfirmed."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Independent triage, prohibited self-exemption, substantive-review exclusions, escalation, preset halt conditions, return to standard review, and automatic expiry provide strong safeguards, though collective and emergent ethnographic harms may remain difficult to detect."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The workflow could be reused across eligible protocols or institutions, but eligibility, community-harm considerations, governing requirements, staffing, and baseline processes are institution-specific, and an easy-case pilot may not generalize."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Retrospective de-identified audit of one defined minimal-risk protocol class, including case abstraction, data preparation, control variables, comparator analysis, and board-ready findings.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Relevant protocol, routing, revision, and decision-date records are accessible.","The audit is limited to one institution and one protocol class.","Existing staff and analysts can perform most work without new data infrastructure.","Participant-protection outcomes can be summarized without recontact or live deployment."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and approval of the eligibility rubric, adjudication process, intake and routing changes, exclusions, metrics, complaint procedures, rollback thresholds, staff training, and supporting workflow configuration.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The institution can adapt existing review systems rather than procure a new platform.","Legal and compliance review is institution-level rather than multi-jurisdictional.","Meaningful community input is obtained through bounded consultations.","Classification testing and reviewer calibration are included."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Run a small sunsetted pilot with independent triage, standard-path or capacity-only comparison, case monitoring, reviewer support, complaint handling, safety oversight, and evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The board authorizes a limited pilot after the audit.","High-risk populations and methods remain excluded.","Existing ethics staff can absorb part of the pilot workload.","The pilot is large enough to assess timing and workload but not necessarily rare harms."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"If affirmatively renewed, maintain triage, reviewer calibration, monitoring, audits, community-feedback channels, workflow administration, compliance review, and periodic comparative evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The pathway remains limited to defined minimal-risk classes.","No major new software platform or dedicated review unit is required.","Ongoing monitoring includes privacy, consent, equity, complaints, workload, and post-approval deviations.","Higher application volume could require additional staffing within this band."]}},"research_burden":"HIGH","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"The candidate defines a recognizable, record-testable problem—pathway-attributable delay, rework, missed opportunities, abandonment, and method substitution in a specified low-risk class—while appropriately leaving prevalence and attribution unresolved."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The authorized university research-ethics board is explicitly assigned control over eligibility, safeguards, escalation, suspension, and renewal; researchers cannot self-exempt."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal predicts that risk-tiered routing will outperform ordinary review and a capacity-only rival on decision time or completion without worsening protection, equity, workload, or deviation outcomes."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A retrospective, de-identified audit of one defined minimal-risk protocol class is bounded, non-deployment, decision-relevant, and can falsify the claimed procedural wedge after controlling for completeness, risk, population, and reviewer capacity."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The first step is a de-identified audit, and any later pilot remains subject to independent board authorization, exclusions, escalation, suspension triggers, standard-path rollback, and automatic expiry."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The candidate identifies workflow, governance, monitoring, and evaluation components but supplies no institution-specific staffing, systems, data-access, compliance, coordination, or recurring-cost evidence; the stated bands are assumption-based resource equivalents."}},"blocking_evidence":["Local case-level evidence that a material share of delay, rework, abandonment, missed opportunities, or method substitution is attributable to the review pathway after controlling for protocol completeness, substantive risk, population, and reviewer capacity.","Evidence distinguishing misclassification and procedural duplication from the capacity-only rival and from necessary ethical deliberation.","A reproducible eligibility rubric with acceptable independent-triage agreement and demonstrated handling of collective, relational, privacy, vulnerability, deception, and community harms.","Board-approved definitions and thresholds for timing, completion, complaints, adverse events, privacy failures, equity, workload, deviations, escalation, halt, and renewal.","Feasible access to de-identified workflow and outcome data sufficient for the retrospective comparison.","Institution-specific staffing, systems, compliance, coordination, and evaluation requirements needed to validate implementation cost and capacity."],"next_evidence_step":"Conduct a retrospective, de-identified audit of one institution's predefined minimal-risk ethnography class, comparing cases and workflow stages with the ordinary pathway and, where records permit, capacity variation; control for protocol completeness, risk, population, and reviewer capacity. Do not authorize live deployment unless the audit shows material pathway-attributable avoidable delay or loss, with no indication that the apparent delay primarily reflects substantive deliberation or incomplete protocols.","research_questions":["How much elapsed time, rework, abandonment, missed field access, or method substitution remains attributable to routing after adjustment for completeness, risk, population, and reviewer capacity?","Does the evidence favor workflow miscalibration over reviewer scarcity or necessary substantive deliberation as the binding cause?","Can the board define minimal-risk eligibility and escalation triggers with reliable agreement and without systematic risk understatement?","Which privacy, consent, equity, collective-harm, complaint, workload, and post-approval-deviation measures are available and decision-relevant?","Would the proposed pathway shift administrative or ethical burden to participants, communities, students, or unpaid reviewers?","What pilot comparison and preset bounds would distinguish useful streamlining from unsafe or merely displaced work?","What institution-specific labor, data, compliance, software, training, coordination, and evaluation resources would implementation require?","How does the candidate compare with existing tiered, expedited, ethnography-specific, or quality-improvement review models once external prior-art research is permitted?","Would increased submission volume recreate congestion or weaken the observed benefit?","Are findings from the selected protocol class likely to transfer beyond unusually simple cases?"] ,"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["Problem prevalence, avoidable-delay magnitude, and affected case volume are unsupported.","No stakeholder demand, adoption commitment, or community acceptance evidence is supplied.","The binding causal wedge may instead be protocol incompleteness, substantive ethical complexity, or insufficient qualified-reviewer capacity.","Prior art, prevalence, market size, realized impact, and world novelty are outside the closed-book record.","Classification reliability and operational eligibility thresholds are not demonstrated.","Rare, collective, relational, reputational, or downstream data harms may not be measurable in a small pilot.","All cost bands are broad resource-equivalent judgments without local staffing, system, compliance, or data-access evidence.","Cross-institution scalability and generalization beyond an easy-case protocol class are unresolved."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior art is explicitly UNSEARCHED. This assessment makes no claim that risk-tiered, expedited, streamlined, or ethnography-specific ethics review is novel, rare, or absent elsewhere; distinctiveness requires external comparison that is prohibited in this closed-book evaluation."}