WCS 3-Sentence Science

Conservation Gets a Business Model

October 31, 2019

CREDIT: JULIE LARSEN MAHER/WCS

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by WCS’s James Watson on promoting conservation innovation.

1. Innovation has the potential to enable conservation science and practice to keep pace with the escalating threats to global biodiversity, but this potential will only be realized if such innovations are designed and developed to fulfill specific needs and solve well‐defined conservation problems.
2. Authors outline a five‐step, “lean start‐up” based approach for considering conservation innovation from a business‐planning perspective.
3. Then, using three prominent conservation initiatives — Marxan (software), Conservation Drones (technology support), and Mataki (wildlife‐tracking devices) — as case studies, we show how considering proposed initiatives from the perspective of a conceptual business model can support innovative technologies in achieving desired conservation outcomes.

Study and Journal: “Identifying technology solutions to bring conservation into the innovation era” from Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
WCS Co-Author(s): James Watson, Climate Change Lead for the WCS Conservation Challenges Program

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.