Sourcing Innovations

This page is about best practices to source innovations.

Innovation can and should come from anywhere
Sourcing is a first step in the process of creating sustainable and transformative solutions, and relies heavily on the execution of the program in order to succeed in attracting breakthrough solutions to complex challenges. The fundamental preconditions for open innovation require not only a shared solution to a problem but also a shared definition and understanding of that problem to facilitate a co-creative process. Instead of simply harnessing the power of the crowd to validate ideas, we will utilize mass collaboration to access the talents of a broader community in forming those ideas to reach the best outcomes across institutions and platforms.

Through open innovation, we will focus a massive community of solvers against the core constraints of these problems, bring in new entrants, technologies, and innovations into conservation, and create an ecosystem of solutions, solvers, and resources that will transform the field and change the view of what is possible. Our goal is to take a high risk, high reward approach to investment in the best ideas early on, allowing for revolutionary over evolutionary advances, and then to scale those companies (and innovations) that have proven success in their impact.

The sourcing of innovations and technologies can come from two primary drivers in the open innovation space:

(1) competitions, challenges, and incentive prizes or

(2) collaborative events and co- design spaces.

In each case, we harness the collective knowledge and expertise of the crowd to understand and begin to solve a problem. The process requires interdisciplinary experts, members of the private and public sector, and input from everyone from citizen scientists to Nobel laureates to create novel technologies, models, or systems.

Collaborative events and sessions can serve a broader purpose in conjunction with prizes to increase public knowledge and recognition of the prize and galvanize activity around the challenge space. Although not as likely to produce a specific scalable solution as a competition, these co-design sessions can serve a valuable purpose in expanding the reach and role of the challenge as a whole and building the broader tribe working on that set of issues or problems. Longer processes or competitions that incorporate iterative models, mentorship, and a scaled-down acceleration process beyond funds can contribute heavily to competitor success once the challenge is complete and also enable sustained engagement around the challenge areas and solutions.

Finally, we will partner with universities to incentivize students and faculty to help us co-design and solve the Conservation Grand Challenges, source breakthrough ideas, license promising intellectual property, and help commercialize innovations and bring them to market. We have ties with leading engineering schools, including Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and environmental schools, including Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, Yale School of Forestry, and Stanford’s Wood’s Institute. We will also work closely with Singularity University, Google, and Microsoft on technology development.

RECOMMENDATIONS
Create a set of conservation challenges that incorporate an incentive prize and co-creative programming to inspire new entrants to the space, harnessing the resources of multi-sector partners to identify the most promising breakthrough solutions and innovators.
 * Engage multi-sector stakeholders and partners to expand reach including government, civil society, NGOs, the private sector, and the startup community.
 * Design the program and develop internal capacity to provide the proper resources and staff to support the challenge and help create a budding conservation innovation community.
 * Create a collaborative, solutions-driven tone for the challenge.
 * Identify the specific barriers and key constraints that—once solved—could lead to the most transformative impact and ignite a breakthrough solution.
 * Create the necessary platforms and facilitate access to key resources that are necessary to solving the identified challenge.
 * Host a large gathering for the completion of the challenge, and a series of co-creative programs to galvanize interest and action in the space.
 * Plan for what follows the challenge, having a clear path and the necessary resources for participants to develop and accelerate their ideas into viable solutions.

SELECTION PROCESS
In making potential investments, we will determine whether the companies and innovations are transformative, impactful, scalable, sustainable, feasible, and potentially profitable. As our goal is to build a platform of long-term sustainability, we will seek to construct a portfolio of diversified risk, impact, novelty, and profitability.

Based on results from the Big Think, challenge design, systems mapping, and innovator outreach, we will establish a detailed set of judging criteria based on the following qualities: Finally, as individuals are significant to the success or failure of a company, we will make an assessment of the leadership potential of the innovators, and our ability to assist them in developing their skills.
 * Transformative: whether the idea is revolutionary, novel, or questions fundamental assumptions in its approach;
 * Impactful: whether the proposed idea will make a significant contribution in advancing conservation efforts through dramatic improvements in efficacy, speed, efficiency, or cost;
 * Scalable: whether the proposed idea is replicable and scalable to different communities, species, and contexts;
 * Sustainable: whether the proposed idea is sustainable in both its design and tenure;
 * Feasible: whether the proposed solution is realistic with an acceptable degree of risk, and noting where it sits on the development spectrum, from idea to deployment;
 * Profitable: whether the proposed solution will be profitable within conservation or through secondary markets outside of conservation, or will lead to intellectual property with the potential to be acquired.