It sounds like you're saying that acceptance criteria are hard to define when there's high uncertainty (a lot of activities are high risk of not yielding anythi

It sounds like you're saying that acceptance criteria are hard to define when there's high uncertainty (a lot of activities are high risk of not yielding anything interesting), which makes sense. In that case, it seems like... * acceptance criteria over "explore" activities (e.g. achieving failure, we are running X high risk/ high reward activities per Y period of time; someone signed off on its value before running it) * acceptance criteria over "exploit" activities (e.g. I need to produce these very clear things of value) In retrospect, though, I think my research community (in psychology) was very open / interested in learning about dead ends. The weirdest outcome is when an advisor learns something from research, but then feels like its obvious, so the research gave them something, but is perceived as low value.