Knowledge and passion are two crucial components of transformation – the third is skills. In our How section, we present tools we are developing that will ensure that you can realize your vision to become a business inspired by nature.
Biomimicry Basics: The What, Why, and How-To of Biomimicry for Design
Many people are inspired by nature, but few know how to turn nature’s strategies into design solutions. This 4-hour online course will provide background info on the why, why, and how of biomimicry, then take you step-by-step through the biomimicry design methods so you create wildy innovative and sustainable designs.
Access course here
BCI Basics: Nature’s Principles and the 5E Cycle
Organisations inspired by nature learn how to embed nature’s strategies in their products, processes, policies, and practices to survive and flourish, seeking out emerging opportunities, and creating greater abundance for themselves and their ecosystems in times of rapid change.
Download BCI Basics
Creating Conditions Conducive for Change
Transformative change is scary. It invites us to enter the unknown, raises insecurities about our abilities to thrive in new roles. , and tests our individual and collective ability to work with uncertainty. Here are some simple tips to help deal with dynamic change successfully.
Download Creating Conditions
Nature’s Principles for Business
A business shaped by nature creates conditions conducive to life and to business. BCI has adapted The Biomimicry Institute’s Life Principles in to principles for business and organisational re-design.
Download Nature’s Principles for Business
Resilience Audit
Resilience is the ability to recover after a disturbance. In nature, disturbance might come in the form of a forest fire, a storm, a rampant disease. What does disturbance look like in your business? How would you go about assessing the resilience of your organisation in order to assess how ‘fit for purpose’ it is to survive and thrive in the volatile times ahead?
Download Resilience Audit
The Real 10
It seems that most sustainability programs – even if successful — are not designed to provide the radical transformation required to meet the challenges the business faces. Hence, the program becomes a side-issue where it ought to be core to the business strategy and operations if your business is to survive and thrive in these transformational times. R10 looks at the vision and steps required to transform towards sustainable business.
Download The Real 10
Risk and Resilience
Although we can’t predict the future, it is clear that the decade ahead will be characterized by increasing uncertainty and increasing volatility, both of which increase the probability, variety, and severity of future risk. Surviving and thriving now and in the foreseeable future will require business to develop innovative and dynamic strategies for managing future risk. A business shaped by nature prepares for future risk by emulating the successful strategies from nature that have been honed over 3.85 billion years of relentless trial and error. With a 99.9% failure rate, organisms that thrive in nature today represent the crème de la crème of risk management strategies.
Download Risk and Resilience
Nature’s Supply Chains
Businesses shaped by nature benefit the ecosystem while creating value for themselves, and also benefit themselves while focusing on creating value for the ecosystem. They do not limit themselves and others to fixed roles and one-way relationships between adjacent links in a supply chain, nor do they try to control the entire chain (vertical monopoly). Instead they work to create and support a business ecosystem comprised optimized dynamic responsive relationships based on mutualism and symbiosis alongside healthy competition.
Download Nature’s Supply Chains
Natural Innovation
We often think of innovation as a highly conscious and intellectual process. But in fact the word ‘innovation’ simply means creating something new through experimentation. We can all do this. And nature is very good at doing this too. In this paper, we look at a few opportunities for businesses to innovate in ways inspired by nature.
Download Natural Innovation
Natural Relationships
Partnerships and alliances between organisations are common place in the business environment. They can take many different forms ranging from tightly coupled joint-ventures to more loosely coupled preferred supplier relationships. Nature can provide immense wisdom on which types of relationships can survive stress as well as providing key examples and inspiration for transformation of your business. This paper explores some of the different relationships nature has evolved, from partner to parasite, to enable survival and draws parallels to business organisational structures.
Download Natural Relationships
Five Lessons Business Can Learn from Nature
Nothing short of radical transformation is needed to deal with our radically changing world; however, conventional top-down organizational structures inhibit radical thinking. Here are five lessons businesses can learn from nature to help start their transformation journey.
Download Five Lessons Business Can Learn from Nature
Discussion of Value: Holistic Thinking, Creativity and Innovation
Simon Robinson, consultant and Professor of complexity, creativity and sustainability, explores 4 compelling questions: How the theory of chaos and complexity affect the business strategy? How organizations can use holistic thinking? What role have mental models on creativity and innovation? How to analyze a complex system?
Access this 8 minute video clip HERE.
The Practice and Application of Biomimicry Methodologies to Design a more Sustainable System for Distilling Water Using Solar Energy
Stefanie Koehler graduated with an MA in Sustainable Design from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the spring of 2013. For her thesis project (advised by Denise DeLuca), she used biomimicry to design a more sustainable water purification process, and in the process examined the role of the biomimicry method as part of the larger discipline of sustainable design. You can see a synopsis of her project HERE and download the full thesis below.
Download MCAD MA Final Thesis – Stefanie Koehler
Product Innovation Inspired by Nature: How Biomimicry Can Help Business to Innovate
Thomas Petrig graduated with an BA in Design Management, International from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Art and Design in the summer of 2013. For his thesis project, he developed a toolkit to help Design Managers integrate biomimcry into the product design process. You can download the full thesis below.
Download BA Thesis Thomas Petrig
Exploring Creativity in Bio-inspired Design: How the understanding of creativity can support the application of bio-inspired design
Torbjorn Aksdal and Kautsar Anggakara Hadianto completed thier Master’s thesis in Organisational Innovation And Entrepreneurship from the Copenhagen Business School in 2013. This thesis investigates ways that the understanding of creativity can strategically support the application of bio-inspired design.
Access the full thesis here.