{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__innovation_entrepreneurship","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"innovation_entrepreneurship","title":"Lifecycle-State Gating for Venture Evidence","opportunity_summary":"Apply visible lifecycle states, supersession markers, retention rules, dependency checks, reversible quarantine, and restoration testing to venture experiment and decision artifacts so obsolete evidence is less likely to appear authoritative without erasing provenance. The proposal is operationally bounded and falsifiable, but problem prevalence, stakeholder demand, comparative effectiveness, and distinctiveness from existing practices remain unverified.","adopter_authorizer":"The likely adopter is a venture or product lead responsible for a squad's evidence repository; irreversible disposition must be authorized by the designated records owner, with legal or privacy approval where applicable and contest rights for artifact and decision owners.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Mistaking superseded experiments or claims for current evidence could affect roadmap, investment, and go-to-market decisions while poor cleanup could destroy decision history. However, the frequency and magnitude of these consequences are unsupported in the sealed candidate."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Founders, product teams, portfolio managers, records stewards, investors, and later team members could benefit, but the candidate contains no interviews, adoption requests, demonstrated budget, or other evidence that these stakeholders prioritize the problem."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Against the specified periodic owner-led cleanup, the proposal adds authority-facing supersession markers, class-based retention, holds, dependency gates, reversible quarantine, audit trails, and restore tests. These additions create a coherent and measurable advantage if teams use the repository."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The combined configuration is plausibly more structured than the stated nearest rival, but novelty relative to records management, knowledge governance, experiment repositories, and decision-log practices is explicitly unsearched and therefore weakly supported."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"A read-only inventory, provisional labels, supersession markers, simulated disposition, and limited recoverable quarantine can be implemented with ordinary repository and workflow capabilities. Identity resolution, tacit dependencies, and cross-tool integration remain material complications."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"The candidate identifies who may label or archive ordinary artifacts, who must approve irreversible destruction, who may contest classifications, and when legal or privacy review applies. Feasibility is reduced by potentially contested ownership and distributed repositories."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":5,"rationale":"The six-week, at-most-100-experiment pilot defines an untreated comparison, measurable retrieval and selection outcomes, explicit intervention and problem falsifiers, excluded actions, halt conditions, rollback, and a read-only-first posture."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":5,"rationale":"Supersession markers can reduce misleading visibility immediately, while quarantine, holds, dependency checks, audit logs, contestability, and restore tests preserve recovery if classification is wrong. Automatic hard deletion and sensitive dispositions are excluded."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Lifecycle labels and rules could be repeated across teams and repositories, but continued value depends on maintenance, identity resolution, observable dependencies, governance capacity, and preventing shadow copies or permanent exceptions."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Six-week read-only-first evaluation of no more than 100 closed experiments from one product squad, including inventory, provisional classification, supersession marking, untreated comparison, simulated disposition, limited quarantine, measurement, coordination, and review.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Existing repository access and basic audit capabilities are available.","The corpus is bounded to one squad and does not require extensive custom integration.","Most cost is staff time from product, repository, records, legal or privacy, and evaluation roles.","No automatic hard deletion or production-wide policy change occurs."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and configure an initial production workflow for one venture unit after favorable evidence, including lifecycle taxonomy, roles, retention mappings, holds, dependency checks, auditability, training, and tested restoration.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Deployment uses existing repository platforms with limited extensions rather than a new enterprise system.","Records, privacy, and legal requirements can be mapped without major remediation.","Historical artifacts require partial rather than exhaustive classification.","The pilot produces usable operating rules."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Launch across multiple venture teams and principal evidence repositories, including integrations, migration or backfill, governance, exception handling, training, monitoring, security and compliance review, and outcome evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Several heterogeneous repositories and stakeholder groups are included.","Cross-tool identity resolution and dependency handling require integration work.","Sensitive and regulated records remain subject to separate controls.","Launch remains within one organization rather than a multi-enterprise product rollout."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Annual operation for one organization, including lifecycle reviews, contested classifications, retention and hold updates, dependency review, restore testing, audits, user support, software administration, and outcome monitoring.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Most processing is supported by existing systems and periodic human review.","Repository volume and policy complexity remain moderate.","The organization assigns part-time stewardship and technical support rather than a large dedicated team.","Material legal disputes, major migrations, and enterprise software purchases are excluded."]}},"research_burden":"MODERATE","earliest_credible_horizon":"0_TO_3_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"The candidate specifies an observable authority ambiguity—multiple dated artifacts without consistent current, superseded, archived, held, or deletion-pending states—and provides a bounded falsifier that can determine whether it affects retrieval or decisions. External prevalence is still unverified."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The venture or product lead can authorize labeling and ordinary archiving, while the designated records owner and applicable legal or privacy functions control irreversible disposition; artifact and decision owners have contest rights."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal claims that lifecycle labels, supersession markers, gated disposition, and reversible quarantine improve authoritative-evidence retrieval and reduce incorrect-current selections relative to untreated artifacts and periodic owner-led cleanup."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"The sealed candidate authorizes a six-week, one-squad, at-most-100-experiment, read-only-first study with an untreated comparison, limited recoverable quarantine, measurable outcomes, and explicit falsifiers."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The pilot excludes hard deletion and sensitive or held records, requires owner approval for quarantine, defines contestability and disposition authority, and mandates halt and restoration upon hold conflicts, dependency loss, retrieval denial, or worse selection behavior."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"The pilot and prospective deployment can be bounded by corpus, teams, repositories, governance work, integrations, evaluation, and recurring stewardship, permitting broad resource-equivalent bands despite low confidence in later-stage costs."}},"blocking_evidence":["Whether obsolete or ambiguously authoritative artifacts are sufficiently common and consequential in the bounded corpus to justify intervention.","Whether the lifecycle treatment improves retrieval time and incorrect-current selection rates relative to the untreated set.","Whether dependencies, holds, and authoritative ownership can be identified reliably enough to avoid missing-dependency incidents and failed retrievals.","Whether classifications remain maintainable and accepted rather than contested, ignored, or bypassed through shadow copies.","Whether relevant adopters and authorizers view the problem as sufficiently important to fund and sustain governance.","Whether the complete configuration is distinct from existing records-management, knowledge-governance, experiment-repository, and decision-log practices."],"next_evidence_step":"Run the authorized six-week, read-only-first study on at most 100 closed experiments from one squad: compare baseline authoritative-evidence retrieval time and incorrect-current selections against an untreated artifact set after provisional lifecycle labels and supersession markers are added, simulate all dispositions, and permit only owner-approved low-impact items into 30-day recoverable quarantine. Falsify progression if there is no comparative improvement or if missing dependencies, contested classifications, failed retrievals, or archived-as-current selections exceed the predeclared tolerance.","research_questions":["Can reviewers already identify authoritative evidence reliably, making the proposed problem negligible?","How often do obsolete or ambiguously labeled artifacts alter retrieval, interpretation, roadmap, or funding judgments?","Which lifecycle signals are sufficiently reliable without treating access frequency as evidence of low value?","Can consequential dependencies and holds be detected when they may be tacit, political, or external to the repository?","Do supersession markers and lifecycle states improve retrieval without granting unjustified authority to weak but current evidence?","What classification contest rate and maintenance burden would make the workflow unsustainable?","Do quarantine and restore tests satisfy retrieval, privacy, legal, and records obligations?","How does the complete system compare with existing records-management, knowledge-governance, experiment-repository, and decision-log practices?","Which adopter owns the recurring stewardship workload and has authority and budget to sustain it?","Does the intervention cause shadow copies, selective storytelling, sanitized failure history, or durable owner exceptions?"],"recommendation":"PRIOR_ART_RESEARCH","uncertainty_constraints":["Closed-book assessment provides no external evidence of problem prevalence, stakeholder demand, market size, realized impact, or adoption willingness.","The candidate is a hypothesis and supplies no completed pilot results.","Distinctiveness cannot be inferred from the stated nearest rival because broader prior art was not searched.","Later-stage cost bands depend heavily on repository heterogeneity, historical backfill, compliance duties, integration requirements, and governance load.","Venture evidence is interpretive and may regain relevance after market changes, limiting deterministic staleness rules.","Tacit or external dependencies may not be representable in repository metadata.","The approach has limited value if teams do not consult the governed repositories."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior art is unsearched and unverified in this closed-book assessment; no claim of novelty, prevalence, market size, established effectiveness, or differentiation from existing records-management, knowledge-governance, experiment-repository, or decision-log practices is made."}