Accelerating technological innovation across the U.S. wildfire management system

Wildfire losses are rising faster than the United States' capacity to prevent, detect, and respond. Promising technologies, including fuel mapping, fire detection, and recovery tools, have the potential to reduce losses. However, they move too slowly from pilot to widespread use because the wildfire management system is fragmented, resources are limited and misaligned, and incentives favor suppression over mitigation and preparedness.

Researchers combined a literature review with stakeholder interviews to assess how wildfire technology innovations move from idea to field use and to identify when and how innovation stalls. The team traced the system of federal, state, local, tribal, nonprofit, and private actors to locate choke points throughout the innovation pipeline. In parallel, the researchers studied models from four government-led innovation organizations — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, the Defense Innovation Unit, and In-Q-Tel — to identify transferable practices to accelerate innovation.

Key findings

• The wildfire management cycle spans prevention, preparedness, response and suppression, and recovery, but most attention and resources go toward suppression.
• The wildfire technology innovation system is polycentric and complex. Authority is distributed among federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, private, and nonprofit actors.
• The innovation system consists of innovators, accelerators, and users of technologies, but few accelerators provide funding, share information, and provide opportunities for pilot testing. The lack of accelerators limits innovations from being developed and adopted at scale.
• The innovation system's strengths are its many innovators, multiple paths for funding and innovation, and its committed individual champions.
• Its weaknesses are the silos that limit coordination, fragmented and primarily small-scale budgets for new technologies that do not support larger or long-term projects at scale, and markets and incentives that skew toward suppression technologies. These three limitations, in turn, create a variety of challenges faced by innovators and users of technologies.