
Conservation International and Hewlett Packard (CI-HP)
In 2017, Conservation International (CI) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which had collaborated on building a software platform named the Wildlife Management Analytics system or WMA, were looking for a way to market the product. The WMA, which made camera trap data on biodiversity easier to analyze, was being incorporated into a free, public, cloud-based website called Wildlife Insights. CI, however, anticipated that scientists, governments, NGOs, businesses, and landowners might want to operate "private instances" of the software, i.e., separate customizable databases on which more specific analyses could be run. HPQ had licensed the software to CI and the nonprofit believed that the best way to distribute the WMA was to sell access to the software, offsetting some of its costs. CI confronted a number of important questions in trying to implement their plan. How should CI determine pricing for the software while advancing its objectives as a nonprofit organization? How did this initiative