skills/innovation-capture/references/lightbringer-authoring.md

# Innovation evidence and authoring

Retrieve `get_innovation_template` for new capture. Its current guide owns the interview, readiness, document structure, schema and field constraints. Follow the main skill for matching records, registration, updates and optional feedback. This reference adds evidence-mapping practices for source exploration; it does not define a second payload schema.

## Map sources to a supported account

**Problem and cause.** Support themes, incidents, analytics and lost-deal reasons can establish a problem and its commercial relevance. Engineering material can explain its technical causes. Preserve useful customer vocabulary while distinguishing observed symptoms from supported mechanisms. When the problem was reconstructed from a solution artifact, identify what the inventor still needs to confirm.

**Mechanism.** Design documents, implementation changes and architecture decisions can explain how the proposed solution addresses those causes. Separate causal explanation from benefit claims. Give enough supported detail for a technical reader to understand the components and their interaction; do not fill gaps with plausible inventions.

**Depth and alternatives.** Look for configurations, embodiments, parameter ranges, failure handling, prototype results and alternatives considered. Distinguish implemented or measured behaviour from proposals. Resolve detail from the authorised sources before asking the inventor to supply it again.

**Known prior work.** Use concrete references from supplied material, saved records or authorised research. Explain what they establish and what remains unassessed. Generic descriptions of “existing systems” are not evidence of prior art, novelty or freedom to operate.

**Visual evidence.** Suggest a concrete drawing and what it should show when it would clarify the mechanism. Match the format to the subject, such as a sequence diagram, cross-section or reaction scheme. A drawing suggestion is not an uploaded attachment; use the available attachment route or explain the remaining manual step.

## Preserve the unresolved remainder

Record material gaps in the form the current template supports: for example, an undefined threshold, missing fallback behaviour, an unconfirmed problem framing or an embodiment that needs explanation. State what is missing and why it matters. Keep source-exploration screening questions and relationships to other innovations traceable without presenting tentative assessments as conclusions.

Do not list questions already answered by the sources, invent facts to meet a minimum, or copy template instructions into the payload. If the live schema cannot honestly represent the available information, retain the candidate as pending registration and explain the missing basis. Use returned validation errors and the live schema to correct supported content; use its current constraints rather than remembered field limits or enum values.