The Marine Protection Prize resulted from a coordinated effort to harness the broad range of talent within leadership/staff and external Explorers funded by National Geographic Society (NGS). To start, Carrot launched NGS’s “What’s Your Idea?” initiative, challenging the world’s leading experts associated with NGS to propose the basic elements of a solicitation for solving a problem crucial to global environmental sustainability. This approach ensured stakeholder and employee engagement and solidified the foundation for the subsequent competition.

The winning concept was submitted by the engineer and conservation scientist, Shah Selbe. Shah focused on how to combine technology and data collection to effectively and affordably monitor and detect illegal fishing. Shah also worked closely with the Carrot team to help craft the rules and requirements, guaranteeing that proposed solutions included inputs from leaders and stakeholders most affected by this problem, combining the need for advanced technologies with the assurance that local conditions and political considerations would help guide their implementation.

Three winners were selected from an impressive pool of 156 teams from around the world that included some of the best and brightest proposals for using technology to better police critical ecosystems and economies. Many of these solutions were adapted from already known and tested technologies, to limit the degree of experimentation or potential negative consequences from any proposed implementation. By focusing on viability and projected impact, NGS was able to attract real solutions while also inducing variations unknown to the marketplace at the time. The ambition of the Marine Protection Prize included both building a community of practice, each of whom would continue to develop their solutions (regardless of whether they received an award), and bringing broad attention to the potential for utilizing these solutions to address a problem that is both technical and political but that - if solved - would ensure new resources to those most in need. As an engine for innovation and storytelling, NGS was able to leverage both the solicitation process and the results to drive meaningful change.