Innovation Inspired by Nature.
Janine Benyus one of sustainability’s most brilliant minds developed the idea of Biomimicry. Biomimicry is the rather simple idea that if we can understand the way in which nature works to acquire and store energy, build bridges and tunnels, create community and manage population that we might get some clues as to what we need to do to create a more sustainable business.
Janine Benyus describes Biomimicry as “coming from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate and is a design discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example of this “innovation inspired by nature.”
Benyus who has worked at the fringes of business has yet to breakthrough to the mainstream. But there are few more deserving of being discovered that is she. “The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.
Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best and brightest organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, create color like a peacock, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.
The conscious emulation of life’s genius is a survival strategy for the human race, a path to a sustainable future. The more our world looks and functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.”