Imagine tapping into a worldwide braintrust, collaborating with the best thinkers, dreamers, and doers across industries, academia, startups, and even competitors. This is open innovation — a strategy that leverages a wide diversity of knowledge to drive innovation faster, cut costs, and speed up paths to market. It’s about not just generating, but also sharing and cultivating ideas beyond traditional company borders.

The world's challenges are too vast, and the potential solutions too rich, for any of us to tackle them alone. Open innovation is a game-changing innovation strategy that invites collaboration over isolation and results in solitary players becoming part of a vibrant network teeming with creativity and knowledge.

Instead of looking for the needle in the haystack, we incentivize the needle to find us. By inspiring innovation through challenges with focused goals and specific problems to solve, we can create entire ecosystems of solvers and expand the focus and resources dedicated to a problem.

We believe that diversity improves innovation and inspires creative thinking. And, we have seen that it works. Our prizes and challenges allow us to focus a growing community of innovators on the world's toughest environmental problems – bringing new perspectives, technologies, and innovations into conservation, and creating a network of new solutions that will transform the field and change the perception of what is possible.

While Open Innovation helps us to crowdsource solutions from innovative minds around the world, Directed Innovation allows us to allocate our internal resources to solving a specific problem -- creating new technologies, companies, and products along the way. Exponential advances in computing, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, robotics, 3D printing, and sensors mean that we can build new tools for conservation - a field that desperately needs them.

CXL’s in-house engineering expertise allows us to design and develop the new technologies that are needed to advance conservation. Our teams are made up of some of the best and brightest engineers, scientists, conservationists, and strategists who use their diverse skill sets to develop new technologies to prevent extinction. These new technologies are based on identified opportunities, expert consultation, industry gaps, and defined parameters to advance innovation for conservation. The new products we build allow us to approach environmental challenges differently while unlocking possibilities for expansion in other fields.

Combining transformative technologies with this entrepreneurial model for scaling real solutions gives us the ability to fundamentally transform technology for conservation. We have seen that this works in the creation and deployment of two technologies that are already impacting conservation efforts as they scale up.

The Sentinel: Conservation X Labs’ Sentinel transforms wildlife monitoring tools — like trail cameras and acoustic recorders — with revolutionary and intuitive AI technology, both machine vision and acoustics, processing environmental data in real-time as it’s collected and notifying users of key species, poachers, disease, and important behaviors.

The NABIT: To empower those on the front lines of conservation, Conservation X Labs has built an innovative tool that places the power of a genetics lab in anyone’s hand. The NABIT (Nucleic Acid Barcode Identification Tool) is an accessible, low-cost, hand-held, field-ready automated tool to validate the identity of a wildlife or food product, anywhere in the world, without specialized training, equipment, reagents, or even continuous power.

These products are evidence of our commitment to run towards hard problems, rather than run away from them, proving the CXL model: innovation must be scaled to save the planet.