Researchers assessed how wildfire technology innovations move from idea to field use and identified gaps. They also located choke points along the innovation pipeline and 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.

Accelerating Technological Innovation Across the U.S. Wildfire Management System

Patrick S. Roberts, Jon Schmid, Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, Jay Balagna, Izabella Martinez

ResearchPublished Jan 2, 2026

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.
  • The system's fragmentation impedes coordination, and its constrained resources — especially for investments in things other than suppression technologies — make it difficult to invest in large-scale technological advances where the market is uncertain or long term.
  • Innovation agencies from other sectors provide lessons for addressing the fragmentation and resource constraints of the wildfire technology innovation system.
  • The research literature offers three governance models for innovation networks: a shared-governance consortium model, a lead-organization model, and a coordinator or network administrative organization (NAO).

Recommendations

  • Create a wildfire innovation NAO to coordinate innovators, accelerators, and users and accelerate the transition of promising technologies from early development to adoption and scale across the full wildfire management cycle.
  • Ensure that the NAO has a stakeholder board, a federal funding anchor, and the ability to receive philanthropic funds.
  • Have the NAO conduct the following activities: Span boundaries, build communities of interest, scan technology horizons, provide nonfinancial technology transition support, make or attract reputable investors to inspire others, directly fund research and development, provide funding via problem-focused prizes, and balance the investment portfolio to ensure that mitigation and preparedness technologies receive support.

Topics

Document Details

Citation

Chicago Manual of Style

Roberts, Patrick S., Jon Schmid, Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, Jay Balagna, and Izabella Martinez, Accelerating Technological Innovation Across the U.S. Wildfire Management System. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3539-1.html.
BibTeX RIS

Research conducted by

This research was sponsored by the Resources Legacy Fund (RLF), and conducted in the RAND Homeland Security Research Division (HSRD).

This publication is part of the RAND research report series. Research reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND research reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited; linking directly to this product page is encouraged. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.