Incubating Innovations

This article is about best practices for incubation innovations.

SUPPORTING COLLABORATION BY DESIGN
The best incubators involve a combination of physical space coupled with programmatic tools and resources, a robust community of fellow startups at different stages, and access to mentors and finance. Our goal is to build not only a library of intellectual property and financially successful companies that will transform conservation, but to harness the collective ideas and wisdom of this community to maximize the success of each innovation for impacting conservation at scale. These efforts would effectively map out the landscape of conservation technology.

In the incubation phase, we will build an ecosystem where the incentives encourage collaboration over competition. This will be a one- or two- year program, with both residence and virtual training components. We will host companies within an incubator space, potentially in partnership with the Global Impact Hub network, which has sites in San Francisco, Berkeley, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as well as world-wide, which would enable us to create a global community of practice, share the best ideas, and promote collaboration across our portfolio of conservation solutions. This may be combined with resources for prototype development.

Through our programming, we will bring in expertise in finance, design, engineering, and business to support and work with the teams. We will also use our own digital training program, Innovation & Design for Global Grand Challenges, developed in partnership with Duke University and the on-line course company Coursera — to help companies and innovators get the expertise they need to scale as social enterprises. We will partner with some of the best programs for social impact globally: Duke’s innovation and entrepreneurship program, Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator, and Further by Design and SecondMuse’s Launch Accelerator to provide further content and programming for training innovators.

Recommendations

 * Educate innovators in entrepreneurial skills including business strategy, pitching their product to investors, and customer acquisition.
 * Provide financial and legal resources to fledgling companies to expand and further develop their product and determine the correct course of action for their product.
 * Expand the publicity and marketing for innovators and provide access points to the right media or contacts to reach customers and the general public.
 * Identify and recruit entrepreneurs who are a step ahead in the process to guide innovators, as well as a broader network of experienced and expert mentors and investors that can help facilitate scaling and market entrance.
 * Provide physical office space and business resources including technological tools to run an effective company and adapt to specific company needs through consistent communication.
 * Locate incubators in hubs of the innovation, startup, and conservation communities in multiple locations including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the developing world.

ITERATE ENGINEERING AND DESIGN FOR CONSERVATION
We will work with a wide range of partners, including those in the conservation community such as WWF, WCS, and the Smithsonian, to take promising technologies and solutions that we invest in or create, from the lab or the garage to the marketplace. To do so, we will work with innovators to field-test and rapidly iterate prototypes across multiple locations, in different socio-cultural contexts, evaluating technologies for cost, environment, function, suitability, reliability, efficacy, manufacturing and distribution.

Recommendations
Create a product development pathway and resources for sourced ideas and innovators that facilitates the development of novel technologies and harnesses the power of a conservation tribe to refine, iterate, and develop ideas into viable solutions.
 * Partner with the scientific and conservation communities to test new technologies or approaches, assess their effectiveness and suitability for their user communities given education levels, operating environments, cost, maintenance & reliability, distribution channels, and manufacturing and assembly.
 * Harness crowdfunding as a means of measuring market readiness, engaging the larger community in design and development, capturing user response and feedback, and expand the market.