Intellectual property valuation is often performed while the technical and commercial environment surrounding an asset is still evolving. This problem becomes particularly visible in standards-driven and interoperable technologies, where technical architecture, standards alignment, implementation pathways and monetisation mechanisms may mature at different speeds. This conceptual paper examines why established valuation methods can therefore produce materially different results even when each method is applied consistently. Rather than treating divergence automatically as methodological failure, the paper frames it as a system-level observability and sequencing problem. Conventional valuation models frequently assume sufficiently bounded usage, interpretable technical relevance and reasonably stable monetisation pathways. Those assumptions can break down when the surrounding innovation system remains fluid. The paper identifies a missing pre-valuation interpretability layer whose purpose is to make unresolved technical, institutional and commercial conditions explicit before numerical valuation is interpreted. The contribution is therefore not a new valuation formula. It is a framework for understanding what a valuation number means when the underlying innovation system has not yet stabilised sufficiently for the assumptions embedded in that number to be treated as settled.