Biomimicry and Business Models for SUE
Biomimicry is an exciting emergent discipline which explores how nature works and how we can learn from nature to solve human problems. Humans have been learning from other species for many thousands of years, yet biomimicry as a formal concept is more recent.
Innovative design inspired by nature
- Nature as model. Biomimicry is a new discipline that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems.
- Nature as measure. Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the ‘rightness’ of our innovations. After 3.8 billion tears of evolution, nature has learned what works, what is appropriate, and what lasts.
- Nature as mentor. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but what we can learn from it.
And also “Life” is defined by:
Organisation management inspired by nature
While biomimicry has mainly focussed on product design, there have also been applications in organisation and team management. Examples include ‘swarm intelligence’ and tree-fungi symbiosis.
Swarm intelligence is the collective decision-making process observed with social insects like ants, termites or bees. There is much to learn from their main behavioural features:
- Flexibility: the group can quickly adapt to a changing environment.
- Robustness: even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks.
- Self-organisation: the group needs relatively little supervision or top-down control.
Social insects can also teach a great deal about innovation and leadership. Their foraging strategies demonstrate a balance between exploitation of existing sources and exploration for new ones, an emerging and democratic decision-making process and a collective support to the chosen options.
Honeybees’ swarming – the splitting of the nest in two when the colony becomes too large – further suggests that organisations cannot grow forever. They will reach a point of diminishing returns when they should spin off some of their operations. “Interestingly, there is no social-insect equivalent to mergers, only spin-offs”.
The mycorrhiza fungi grow in a fungal mat in the ground between the trees that have access to both sun and water, distributing these necessary nutrients between the trees. This inspired the re-organisation strategy of the United States Green Building Council –founder of the LEED certification system.
Biomimicry for business management
Michael Braungart and William Mc Donough developed in 2002 with ‘Cradle to Cradle’, which focused on closed-loops systems – where waste equals ‘food’ or input – and solution-based business models. Beside the application to organisation and team management, biomimicry for business management has however not grown as much as its design counterpart. Yet, beyond specific technical solutions, nature provides a powerful and rich source of inspirational metaphors. This requires an understanding of more abstract and conceptual principles that govern nature.
In that respect, taking inspiration from nature to inform organisation and business management is not a novelty, similarly to design inspired by nature.
A 5 stage transformational process and a case study template is presented in this workshop with numerous examples.
