As the sole strategist and designer behind this side project, a thinking tool for behavioral design and systems thinking outside my day job, I grounded the strategy in Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics, designing for restoration rather than pure growth, and Stephen Wendel's behavioral-design framework to address the gap between people's environmental intentions and their actual actions, specifically using the "Cheat" strategy: shifting logistical burden away from the user and onto the product itself. I used the Value Proposition Canvas to pressure-test whether the platform mapped to a real job travelers and NGOs were actually trying to do, and the Business Model Canvas to make the blended-finance structure (using grants to de-risk early investment so private capital can follow) legible as a coherent system rather than a collection of funding ideas. I chose depth and trust over mass-market scale to protect the integrity of the conservation work itself. Market sizing using top-down research from Dataintelo and Grand View Research confirmed the opportunity at USD 185.2 billion in 2024, growing at a 12.4% CAGR, a genuine TAM worth the strategic bet.

I conducted secondary research synthesis across roughly 50 sources spanning economics, behavioral science, marine policy, and business strategy during the d.MBA program, and used AI tools deliberately, to synthesize research faster and produce a concept podcast and pitch materials I couldn't have resourced otherwise at this stage, while curating and fine-tuning every output myself. That's a real tension I sit with honestly: using energy-intensive technology in service of an environmental project is a question worth keeping open, not resolving with a slogan.