# 12 Claude Skills for an Innovation Program That Earns Its Budget 12 free Claude skills for innovation management: charter the program, run gates and experiments, manage the portfolio and build the investment case. - Page: https://lantern.meet-polar-bear.com/skills/innovation-pack - Download: https://lantern.meet-polar-bear.com/skills/innovation-pack.zip - Source: https://github.com/polar-bear-org/claude-skills/tree/main/packs/innovation-pack - Price: free ## Install in Claude Code ``` /plugin marketplace add polar-bear-org/claude-skills /plugin install innovation-pack@polar-bear-skills ``` ## The 12 skills you get Two skills write the program's rules, two keep it honest month to month, five carry one bet from a challenge to evidence, and three turn that evidence into a decision, a budget, or a dignified close. ### 1 · Write the rules, once - **Program Charter Writer** — use when: You keep starting side projects and nobody can say what the program is for or who owns the money. Output: The one page that lets a program say no: why it exists, what counts as an initiative, the target ambition mix, the money and time envelope, who decides what, and the review rhythm. Run it first — every other skill in the pack reads the charter. - **Stage Gate Designer** — use when: Your gate meeting either waves everything through or kills the interesting ones. Output: Three or four stages with one decision per gate, questions instead of scores, a small funding round per stage, a way back one stage instead of dying, and kill criteria agreed while nobody's project was on the table. ### 2 · Keep the program honest - **Innovation Ledger Keeper** — use when: Leadership asks what the program delivered and all you have is a list of activities. Output: The program's accounting: leading indicators per initiative and per stage, plus program-level measures — cycle time, kill rate, learning velocity, money by stage. One line per initiative per month, the same columns every time. First run after the charter and the gates, then monthly. - **Portfolio Mapper** — use when: You have nine things going and suspect they are all the same kind of bet. Output: Every live initiative placed on ambition and stage, the mix held against what the charter promised, and the crowding and the holes named in plain words. It does not rank initiatives; it shows the firm what shape its bets have. ### 3 · Take one bet from challenge to evidence - **Innovation Challenge Framer** — use when: The partners want you to “do something with AI for clients” and that is the whole brief. Output: A problem statement with edges: who has the problem, what it costs them, what a good answer would have to be true of, and what is out of bounds. Deliberately narrow — narrow challenges produce testable ideas, wide ones produce posters. - **Ideation Session Runner** — use when: You have a challenge, a Friday afternoon and twelve people. Output: The format the challenge needs — pitch hour, sketch sprint, worst-idea round, client-signal harvest — with selection rules that keep the partner's opinion from being the vote, and an exit that is two or three idea one-pagers rather than a wall of notes. Claude does not generate the ideas. - **Discovery Interview Planner** — use when: Somebody should talk to customers before the prototype, and nobody has said who or what to ask. Output: The conversations an idea needs before anything is built: who, how many, the guide, consent, the note template, and the synthesis into evidence. Claude plans them and turns the notes into evidence; it never has the conversation or plays the customer. - **Experiment Designer** — use when: You think agencies would pay for this, and you want to find out in three weeks without building it. Output: The assumptions mapped, the riskiest one picked, and an experiment card naming the method, the number that means pass, the number that means fail, and the date — all written before the test runs, because afterwards every number looks like the one you meant. - **Experiment Results Reader** — use when: The landing page got 41 signups and everyone in the room has an opinion about whether that is good. Output: The results held against the card the team wrote first, with neither side renegotiating the numbers: the learning in one paragraph, and a scale, pivot, persevere or kill recommendation for a named human to decide on. Results with no prior card are a story, and get treated as one. ### 4 · Decide, fund, or close - **Gate Review Preparer** — use when: The gate review is Thursday and the team has thirty slides. Output: One initiative ready for one gate: the one-page evidence brief in the shape every initiative uses, the gate's own questions and kill criteria to be read before the team speaks, a ten-minute script, and the decision record with one name on it. - **Investment Case Writer** — use when: Budget season, and the program has to justify its existence in a way that survives the CFO. Output: The case for continued investment in the currency the program actually produces, which is reduced uncertainty: what was learned, what was stopped and why, the portfolio against the target mix, and what the next round costs — in the units the charter used. It will not dress a quarter with no decisions as momentum. - **Initiative Sunset Writer** — use when: You are stopping the client-portal idea and the two people who ran it are taking it personally. Output: The memo that records the decision and the honest reasons, the harvest of what can be reused, and the message to the team and to the customers who took part. It writes the decision as the decider's, never as the people's — and it will not run without a signed one. ## Workflows - **Write the rules once** (Side projects keep starting and nobody owns the budget.) Program Charter Writer → Stage Gate Designer → Innovation Ledger Keeper - **Aim the next challenge** (Nine things are in progress and they all look alike.) Portfolio Mapper → Innovation Challenge Framer → Ideation Session Runner - **Test before you build** (Someone should talk to customers before you build.) Discovery Interview Planner → Experiment Designer → Experiment Results Reader - **Get a signed decision** (The gate is Thursday and there are thirty slides.) Experiment Results Reader → Gate Review Preparer → Initiative Sunset Writer - **Make the investment case** (The CFO is asking what innovation is for.) Innovation Ledger Keeper → Portfolio Mapper → Investment Case Writer ## The quality bar - Evidence comes from the market and decisions come from named humans: Claude designs the test and keeps the ledger, and never simulates a customer, scores an idea, or makes the kill call - Kill criteria are agreed before anything enters the pipeline — a criterion invented during the review is an opinion with a number on it - One gate asks one question and produces one decision, on a brief shaped the same for every initiative, so reviewers compare evidence and not presentation skill - Pass and fail thresholds are written on the card before the experiment runs, because afterwards every number looks like the one you meant - Results with no prior card are a story rather than an experiment, and get read as one - The ledger is boring by design: one line per initiative per month, the same columns every time — a ledger whose columns change every quarter is a slideshow - The portfolio map shows the shape of the firm's bets; it never ranks them - Every gate decision carries a name, and a stop with no signature is not written up, because an initiative stopped without one gets quietly restarted by whoever loved it - An initiative is closed with the decision separated from the people: how a firm stops things decides whether anyone proposes the next one ## Questions people ask ### What is in the Innovation pack? 12 Claude skills for running an innovation program. Two write the rules once, two keep the ledger and the portfolio map, five take one bet from challenge to evidence, and three help you decide, fund, or close. ### How do I install these Claude skills? In Claude Code, two lines install all 12 at once. In Claude.ai or Claude Desktop, download the zip, open Settings, Skills, Add, and upload the skills you want. Either way it takes about five minutes. ### Do I need Claude Code to use them? No. The skills work in Claude.ai, Claude Desktop and Claude Code. In the app you upload them yourself; in Claude Code one command installs the whole pack. ### Do the skills work with ChatGPT or other assistants? They are built as Claude Skills, and installing them is a Claude feature. Each one is a plain Markdown file, so you can read it and reuse the method elsewhere, but it will not load and trigger by itself outside Claude. ### Will Claude decide which ideas to kill? No. Evidence comes from the market, and decisions come from named humans. Claude designs the test and keeps the ledger. It never simulates a customer, scores an idea, or makes the kill call. ### Is the pack free? Yes. It is free to use inside your company and in client work, and not for resale. There is no signup: the download and the install command are on this page. ## About Written by Polar Bear (https://meet-polar-bear.com/). Published on Lantern (https://lantern.meet-polar-bear.com/), which turns your notes, documents and call transcripts into social post drafts you review and publish.