Exnovation

The piece “When digital technologies stumble: Exnovating for conservation science and practice” by Danilo Urzedo and Sabrina Chakori on “exnovation” reads like a bitter wake-up call. Because those shiny digital toys that were supposed to save biodiversity? They’re starting to glitch, misbehave, and tank entire projects. From camera traps that happily spam you with thousands of pictures of leaves, to drones that kamikaze into the first tree they meet, to algorithms so “confident” they can mistake a tapir for a tank. If you think about it for a second, the catalog of “innovations” turning into liabilities is impressively thick. In IT, we’ve known this story for years - hype, sprints, beta versions dumped onto users, and then a hasty retreat before anyone notices it doesn’t work. Conservation, it seems, is now learning from our mistakes.

The authors propose a remedy with a suspiciously familiar ring - exnovation. Instead of waging yet another holy war for the Next Big Breakthrough, the first step is cleaning up the garage. Exnovation is essentially digital spring cleaning, discarding the junk, patching what can be salvaged, and sometimes even reverting to good old analog tools. From an IT perspective, this sounds like heresy. After all, the entire business model depends on selling you the same thing every year, just with a shinier sticker. And here come these folks saying that sometimes it’s better to quit than to double down on a dead end. Sounds almost like an anti-innovation manifesto... the kind of thing that, in Silicon Valley, would be filed under “dark magic.”

But the problem is real. Conservation tech, shoved into environments full of social and ecological complexity, fails more often than we like to admit. Data is biased, systems are invasive, and e-waste is becoming the newest environmental headache. The irony is delicious because the very tools meant to save nature end up trashing it. Add to that the invisible costs of reinforcing inequality in tech access, imposing foreign standards and algorithmic judgments on local communities. Sound familiar? Of course it does, because IT has been doing the same thing for decades. AI decides who gets a loan, while “free” apps stalk you harder than they help. In both cases, tech doesn’t fix problems, it magnifies them.

That’s why the authors anchor exnovation on four pillars. Starts with minimizing risk, diagnosing damage, repairing or removing useless solutions, and finally replacing them with something that makes sense. Strip away the academic jargon, and it’s just common sense. Every sysadmin knows it’s sometimes easier to wipe a cursed server than to keep slapping patches on it. Every security engineer knows you can’t patch your way out of a rotten core design. The difference in conservation is that the stakes aren’t a broken CRM, but an entire ecosystem.

And here comes the ultimate irony. IT has lived for years by the mantra “move fast and break things.” If it’s just another food delivery app, “break” means investors lose some money. But when you drop half-baked tech into environmental protection, “break” means real losses - species gone, trust with local communities shattered, yet another mountain of e-waste. In that context, exnovation isn’t a luxury, it’s survival. It’s the moment conservationists learn what IT always knew but rarely practiced. I'm referring here to the fact that courage isn’t just based on launching shiny new toys, it’s also knowing when to pull the plug.

Interestingly, the authors showcase positive examples too, like local repair workshops, DIY initiatives, and drones built by communities instead of bought from megacorps. In IT, that sounds like a throwback to the garage days - when real innovation came from tinkering, not flashy conference slides. Romantic? Sure. But there’s a method to it. Instead of chasing the global hype cycle, why not lean into solutions rooted in the local context? Sounds familiar again, doesn’t it?Every IT company that ever truly succeeded knew when to kill a failed project.

In a world chasing the next buzzword - AI, blockchain, metaverse, and now generative wonders, it’s worth remembering that technology is not an end in itself. If it doesn’t work, fix it. If it can’t be fixed, retire it. There’s no shame in that. On the contrary, that’s maturity. Exnovation isn’t surrender, it’s innovation hygiene. IT could stand to learn from thebiologists: real progress isn’t about multiplying gadgets, but eliminating the ones that don’t serve. Only then does technology stop being the problem and start being the solution.