INSPIRING INNOVATIVE IDEAS
Welcome on board for the journey into the immense wisdom of Nature and Biomimicry’s realm for boosting innovation and agility into Business.
Biomimicry for Business is a learning space created by Diana Tedoldi, Coach and founder of the Nature Coaching Academy, and Silvia Mirandola, Biologist, Coach and manager.
Our innovative idea wants to inspire managers on new leadership and team-working models based on living systems logic and Biomimicry. By forging your mindset with the wisdom of Nature and its guide principles, you will be able to rapidly sense and respond to the changing business climate by engaging, co-creating, and innovating with your ecosystem of colleagues, customers, suppliers, resources, investors, society and environment.
How can leaders draw inspiration from the African wild dogs, ants, forests, viruses, and bacteria to create innovation and agility within organizations?
WHAT DO COMPANIES NEED MOST?
Companies need to speed innovative and lean solutions to market for evolving and surviving in a rapidly changing world and competitive landscape. It is also important that they build up resilience and agility to quickly adapt to changes, resist disruptions smoothly, and deal with crises creatively.
The central idea is that Nature has already fixed many problems society is facing. Animals, plants, and microorganisms are experienced engineers, designers, collaborators, and problem solvers. They know what works, what is appropriate, and most importantly, what lasts on Earth. Biomimicry is a new discipline that aims to take inspiration from natural selection solutions adopted by Nature and translate the principles to human engineering, architecture, design, and recently also to social innovation. The Biomimicry approach favors “choices” tested by Nature, which had 3.8 billion years to understand what works best and what does not.
BIOMIMICRY: shifting the mindset
Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute, biologist, and author of the book “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature” has defined biomimicry as the “conscious emulation of life’s genius,” that is:
• Conscious: being intentional
• Emulation : learning from living things, then applying those insights to the challenges humans want to solve
- Life’s genius: recognizing that life has arrived at well-adapted solutions that have stood the test of time, within the constraints of a planet with finite resources.
Solutions following Biological intelligence will ultimately allow human productions and business to be more efficient, resilient and agile
By observing mutualistic relationships amid organisms, managers could shift the mindset from Competition to Coopetition (Cooperation+competition), which means collaboration with competitors for mutual benefit.
Teams can improve their performance and effectiveness by emulating the self-organization of ants and bees or the collective intelligence of fish schools and flocks.
We need to look at workplaces as living systems (biomes) driven by the principle of autopoiesis: a system that can be represented as a network of processes of creation, transformation, and destruction of components that, by interacting with each other, continuously support and regenerate the system.
This could be a metamorphosis for organizations that will allow them to move from rigid, restrictive and constraining hierarchy into a more vibrant, resilient, responsive, “coopetitive”, agile and regenerative model shaped on living-systems. Companies need a new leadership consciousness, a restyling of relationships both with internal and external stakeholders and a “regenerative shift” that will transform them from ego-systems to eco-systems.
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