iTrade Wildlife - software to detect illegal wildlife sales

The work to be undertaken will explore the critical pathways needed for the successful commercialisation of the iTrade software and development of a Follow-On proposal. This will be achieved through the use of a business consultant to address the following areas and potentially identify others, which we may not have been identified. Specifically

1. Legislation & regulatory requirement related to
a setting up partners/equity & company eg tax implications
b product's use eg use of automated systems by police
c service provision/contractual agreements with clients
2. Market Research
a Understanding competitor base eg marketing strategy & offer to customers
b Understanding customer base eg levels of provision/service to client & charges (organisation's budget constraints)
3. Product Research & Development
a Potential for expansion of iTrade into other regions
b Potential for expansion of service/product into other areas of illegal trade
4. Business Status
a Inform the discussion to agree vision, equity & relationship between the PI, co-PI, the School, University & other university employees with whom we have collaboration related to the product
b Establish & progress shape of business. When this should occur and in what form eg consultancy, Community Interest Company, Limited Company
c Produce Business Plan
5. Branding & trademarking of product/company

Impact Summary: The illegal wildlife trade is 4th only to narcotics, human and counterfeiting in terms of transnational trafficking, and estimated to be worth $19-26.5billion pa. The UN recognised by consensus that environmental crime as an emerging form of transnational organised crime requiring a greater response by governments. At the University of Kent, we have developed software, 'iTrade', that automatically identifies illegally traded items with 90% accuracy, generating reports every 10mins. Normally the identification of cybercrime of this form involves law enforcement officers simply going through thousands of web pages by hand. iTrade goes through all these pages automatically weighting them as more or less likely to be illegal, saving officers a significant amount of time. For example a fulltime MSc student spent 6 weeks searching eBay and found 199 items of elephant ivory sold in that time. This could be done automatically with the software in a fraction of the time.

The business model we envisaged following is that used in the biotechnology industry where companies provide a service of building 'enriched' molecular libraries thereby saving researchers a considerable time; in our case we will provide users with 'enriched' lists of illegal items for sale from sources under investigation. The licensing and exploitation will therefore be costed on the basis of the licensees trading platform. In other words we retain the software and provide an intelligence service. While we will start with illegal wildlife trade, the service could be easily expanded into other forms of illegal cybertrade.

We already have established partners, and therefore a customer base, in the Police (National Wildlife Crime Unit), UK Border Force and the International Fund for Animal Welfare with whom Dr Roberts has been working with for over 10 years. Further discussions have already taken place with the Dutch police force regarding the service. As far as our partners and we are aware such a product or service does not exist.

The PI has limited experience of commercialisation, although it should be noted that the University of Kent has a dedicated business engagement department and Technology Transfer Office. For the PI and co-PI therefore there are a number of 'known unknowns' regarding commercialisation and probably many 'unknown unknowns.' The Pathfinder would allow us to address questions associated with legal, financial, business and marketing aspects of our product essential for its successful commercialisation, through the development of a Follow-on Funding proposal.