Biomimicry in Business

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Biomimicry in Business

• Five Principles

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Value Chains
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Find the Value Chain
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Find the Value Chain
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Natures Business Principles

• Natures processes are cyclic

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in vivo Recycline
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in vivo Recycline
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Market Strategies
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Diet

• Grasses
• Pine nuts
• Roots, tubers
• Moths, ladybugs
• Rodents
• Scavenged food
• Salmon, trout, bass
• Sheep, Deer
• Caribou, Elk
• Bison, moose
• Black bears!

• The moist, tender tips of the leaves from about
  30 of the 600 varieties of eucalyptus trees

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Range
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Market Strategies
Generalist Strategy
Niche Strategy
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Why These Different Strategies?

• Homogeneous, constant environment
• Many predators on the ground
• Little competition for food sources
• Small

• Diverse environment
• Cyclical feeding cycle
• Few predators
• Lots of competition for food sources
• Huge

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Natures Business Principles

• Natures processes are cyclic
• Nature uses both niche and generalist strategies,
  depending on market context

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in vivo Two Different Strategies
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Diversity in Nature
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Natures Business Principles

• Natures processes are cyclic
• Nature uses both niche and generalist strategies,
  depending on market context
• Nature favors diversity

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in vivo Internet Companies
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Keystone Species
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Natures Business Principles

• Natures processes are cyclic
• Nature uses both niche and generalist strategies,
  depending on market context
• Nature favors diversity
• A few species are keystone species

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in vivo The Internet Ecosystem
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Nature Experiments Readily
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Nature Experiments Readily
The metabolic pathways of respiration an
intelligent design?
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Natures Business Principles

• Natures processes are cyclic
• Nature uses both niche and generalist strategies,
  depending on market context
• Nature favors diversity
• A few organisms are keystone species
• Nature experiments readily

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in vivo Commercial Flight
Airbus A380
The Spruce Goose
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Putting it all Together Interface

• Cyclic processes the Evergreen lease
• Market strategies a 1B niche
• Diversity carpets like a forest floor
• Keystone leveraging sustainability leadership
• Experimenting Ray Andersons wake-up call

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QA

• Daniel Arneman Introduction
• Nick Beck Case studies
• Kevin Stack Biomimicry in Green Building
• Asheen Phansey Biomimicry in Business

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Natures Business Principles

• Natures processes are cyclic
• Nature uses both niche and generalist strategies,
  depending on market context
• Nature favors diversity
• A few organisms are keystone species
• Nature experiments readily

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Dont Take My Word For It

• Business thinking is evolving from
  bureaucratic and mechanistic models to more
  organic perspectives emerging from biology and
  living systems theory.-Verna Allee, A Value
  Network Approach for Modeling and Measuring
  IntangiblesTransparent Enterprise, Madrid, 2002
• There are certainly strong parallels between
  business networks and biological ecosystems.
  Both are characterized by a large number of
  loosely interconnected participants that depend
  on one another for survival.Modern business
  networks and biological ecosystems also are
  characterized by the presence of crucial hubs
  that assume the keystone function of regulating
  ecosystem health.The biological counterparts
  of the two other primary roles we have identified
  in business ecosystemsthe dominator and the
  niche playerare more obvious.-Marco Iansiti
  and Roy Levien, Strategy as Ecology Harvard
  Business Review, March 2004

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