/gaia-innovation

What it does

/gaia-innovation identifies business-model innovation and strategic disruption opportunities through a five-phase pipeline: Market Context, Jobs-to-be-Done, Blue Ocean (ERRC grid), Business Model Canvas, and Strategic Roadmap. It focuses on finding the non-consumer -- where disruption lives.

When to use it

• You want to identify disruption opportunities using Blue Ocean Strategy (ERRC grid: Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create).
• You need to map Jobs-to-be-Done and find the non-consumer -- the underserved segment where disruption lives.
• You want a Business Model Canvas and a strategic roadmap that connects innovation ideas to concrete business-model implications.

Prerequisites

• No strict prerequisites. Works best when planning artifacts exist for context.

Orchestration mode

When /gaia-innovation starts in subagent mode (Mode A -- the default), the framework emits a one-shot warning to your conversation. The warning text:

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
GAIA orchestration: running in subagent mode (Mode A)

The skill you're invoking belongs to a class (heavy-procedural or
conversational) whose output benefits from cross-step context. Mode A
dispatches each sub-agent in its own forked context, so context may
be lossy between steps — sub-agents return summaries, not full reasoning.

For the full-fidelity experience, enable Mode B (Agent Teams):
  1. Set CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1 in your environment.
  2. Add orchestration.mode: team to .gaia/config/project-config.yaml.

Mode B uses persistent teammates that preserve in-conversation state
across dispatches.

This warning is shown once per session.
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Why Mode B is better for this command

The /gaia-innovation skill declares orchestration_class: heavy-procedural in its SKILL.md frontmatter. Heavy-procedural skills produce output that benefits from cross-step context -- under Mode A every sub-agent dispatch runs in its own forked context and can only return a summary back to the orchestrator, losing the full reasoning trace of every prior step. Mode B uses persistent teammates that retain in-conversation state across dispatches, so each agent's contribution can build on what was said before instead of receiving only a summary.

How to enable Mode B

Both steps are required. If either is missing, the framework falls back silently to Mode A and the warning fires again on the next session.

Step 1 -- set the environment variable:

export CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1

Add this to your shell rc file to persist across sessions, or set it in Claude Code's settings.json.

Step 2 -- add the YAML block to .gaia/config/project-config.yaml:

orchestration:
  mode: team

One-shot semantics

The warning is emitted once per Claude Code session. A marker file at _memory/checkpoints/orchestration-warning-shown.<session-id> suppresses the warning for the rest of the session. Starting a new session re-emits the warning once.

How to invoke

/gaia-innovation Hotel industry digital transformation

What it does step by step

1. Market context Maps the current market landscape, key players, and trends.
2. Jobs-to-be-Done Identifies functional, emotional, and social jobs including non-consumers.
3. Blue Ocean / ERRC Applies the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid to find uncontested market space.
4. Business Model Canvas Maps the 9 building blocks and the Value Proposition Canvas.
5. Strategic roadmap Creates a phased roadmap with beachhead market and tech-adoption-lifecycle mapping.
6. Generate artifact Writes to .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/innovation-strategy-{date}.md.

Inputs

Outputs

Example session

> /gaia-innovation Hotel industry digital transformation

Phase 1: Market Context...
Phase 2: Jobs-to-be-Done -- 12 jobs identified, 3 non-consumer segments.
Phase 3: Blue Ocean / ERRC grid generated.
Phase 4: Business Model Canvas (9 blocks) + VPC.
Phase 5: Strategic roadmap -- 3 phases, 18-month horizon.

Written to .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/innovation-strategy-2026-05-07.md

What to run next

• Review the ERRC grid and Business Model Canvas, then feed the top opportunities into /gaia-product-brief.
• Use the strategic roadmap to inform architecture decisions in /gaia-create-arch.

Troubleshooting

Topic not provided

The command asks for your topic interactively if no argument is given.

I keep seeing the GAIA orchestration warning every time I start this command

The warning is shown once per session, so if it fires again that's a new session -- not a per-skill repeat. If you want to silence it entirely, enable Mode B (full-fidelity orchestration via Agent Teams). Both of these conditions must be true:

• echo $CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS returns 1 (not empty)
• .gaia/config/project-config.yaml contains:

  orchestration:
    mode: team

If either is missing the framework silently uses Mode A and re-emits the warning each session.

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