Biomimicry and Business

How Companies Are Using Nature's Strategies to Succeed

Margo Farnsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000204636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Business
• Index: Business

Biomimicry, the practice of observing then mimicking nature's strategies to solve business challenges, offers a path to healthy profit while working in partnership, and even reciprocity, with the natural world. Other books have described biomimicry, its uses, and its benefits. This book is the first to show readers how they can successfully bring biomimicry and bioinspired design into their companies based on what other businesses have already achieved.

Fashioned through storytelling, this book blends snapshots of five successful companies – Nike, Interface, Inc., PAX Scientific, Sharklet Technologies, and Encycle – which decided to partner with nature by deploying biomimicry. The book details how they discovered the practices, introduced them to staff, engaged in the process, and measured outcomes. The book concludes with challenges for readers to determine their own next steps in business and offers practical and useful resources to get there.

By revealing the stories of each professional's journey with lessons they learned, then providing resources and issuing a challenge and pathway to do business better, this book serves as a tool for entrepreneurs, seasoned professionals, and students to emulate nature's brilliance, apply it at work, and contribute to a healthier, more prosperous world.

1

Making a living

Natura nihil fit in frustra.

Nature does nothing in vain.

It used to be just go to work. Make a living.

Most of us aren’t raised with any notion of doing more than this in business. I certainly wasn’t.

I was taught to think of my career as the vehicle to support myself and my family. The courses I took steeped me in knowledge handed down over time from businessmen and women, scientists and educators who had successfully laid the technological and business groundwork for companies, researchers and future public servants. Few of those courses included problem-solving strategies used by other organisms with whom we share the land, sea, and skies. Never were we taught to ask how they would accomplish a task.

While many of us may have a place in our hearts for or even take action on behalf of those organisms (the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees), we seldom focus on them much in our professional lives. Information and guidance on Earth’s other inhabitants regarding their health, populations, need for and availability of viable homes and food supplies, along with whatever strategies for success they may use, are cordoned off to our pre-career lives or later at least partially siloed away from paying work under titles like philanthropy or volunteerism. Even when corporate sustainability reports came into being, little if any professional training taught us anything about considering nature as a business partner and mentor. Who knew how profitable that partnership could be on so many levels across so many professions?

Extending partnerships

Partnerships are commonplace in business. We generally think of them as relationships where some sort of exchange for mutual benefit takes place – a kind of reciprocity if you will. These exchanges, usually of ideas, goods, services, or finance, take place with other humans. This limited version of reciprocity and way of thinking is not our fault. It’s how we were raised.

My father and his business partner dealt with exchanging goods and services for payment from customers. They sold pianos and each had his role in the company along with strategies for his accepted area of expertise. Dad eventually applied the same accepted business platform to several companies. He identified a consumer need or desire, usually spotted a partner with a complementary area of expertise and then responded to customer demands through product delivery. These customers subsequently paid for the product or service at a profit point acceptable to both parties. As the purchases became larger, the platform also included interest from financing as part of the equation. This was and is a common notion of business, so the customary reciprocity that lies within its forms of partnerships has become a standard format we recognize and follow.

This business model has been built on a foundation of financial and business resource metaphorical two-by-fours. If you examine the entire underpinning of the business though, you’ll discover the real foundation of making a living ultimately resides in the presence, health, and abundance of our natural resources. Take the $200 billion annual forest product industry¹ for example. We regularly think of lumber being used for building and paper products. What we don’t generally consider is the full scope of the products containing wood from crayons to coveralls and even more surprising products such as toothpaste and hairspray. Oh yes, and pianos. To make products like these, have the ability to sell them, or utilize raw materials for any of our work, raw materials must exist in the first place.

The abundance and quality of these living resources are reliant on physical forces such as temperature, precipitation, wind, and the seasons to which all living things must respond in some way or other. Living organisms, in turn, play parts in the cycles for water, nitrogen, and other necessary elements that move from air to Earth and back again – sustaining all life in the process. Often less clear but no less important are the relationships among these physical assets and cycles, and the plants, nonhuman animals, and other living beings which are also all part of our mutual support structure. We know Louisville Slugger is dependent on a plentiful supply of maple and ash trees for its popular bats. That kind of business we understand, complete with the transactions among lumber companies, the bat company and those businesses engaged in distribution. However, the business of those two particular trees also supports over 400 kinds of insects as well.²

This is one of the places where human enterprise has historically diverged from the broader requirements for reciprocity, life overall, and how planetary concerns have mixed and mingled with those of even a bat company. Let’s take those 400 insect species and their roles. You probably remember from middle school science a little about the web of life, but unless you chose life sciences as a profession, the concepts may have been left back in the window seat of Mr. Smith’s science classroom. No matter – here’s why those lessons are critical to you now in business and in life. Of course, you know insects are a food source for ever larger animals up to and including animals we eat. However, their efforts in pollinating plants also deliver one out of every three bites of food we consume. As important, frankly more so to the folks at Louisville Slugger, in death they recycle nutrients that nourish those maple and ash trees allowing them to grow into the kind of trees our Major League Baseball players want to use for the big hits. Additionally, as those trees and other plants grow, they play a major role in, you guessed it, those cycles for water and nitrogen but also oxygen, carbon dioxide, phosphorous, and more – life stuff.

Within this big framework, life depends on those physical forces and a grand amalgam of organisms and their systems. We humans are part of those systems and also affect their abundance and quality as we make business and buying choices that directly influence them and their surroundings. Instead of simply harvesting raw materials from nature without much thought to all that supports them, leaders at more and more companies are beginning to build a new business model. They are beginning to recognize the value of our natural resources and their critical two-by-fours which support both our companies and our communities. These businesses are interfacing directly with the world outside their doors by taking on nonhuman organisms as partners.

Our human partnerships have been based on relationships with colleagues who have generally been on Earth around the same amount of time as us (give or take a few years to a decade or so). Their well of knowledge, if different from ours, may go back a few hundred years to maybe a couple of thousand depending on the developmental expertise in their field of practice and experience they have amassed. But what if you could consult a business partner with a billion or so years of experience who had successfully adapted to become efficient with materials and energy? What if that partner could adapt to change easily? Would you be interested if they could integrate development with growth or be responsive to local conditions, which then helped you fine-tune your product or services?³ Learning from these valuable skill sets could go a long way toward helping you make a living.

Such a partner exists right outside your door. The plants, animals, and other organisms there have been solving problems with structures, processes, and systems for longer than our own species has existed on Earth. While each person in a company doesn’t actually need to understand every minute detail of nature in our day-to-day lives at the office, we do need to recognize and understand it provides those natural resource two-by-fours necessary for a firm business foundation. It can also offer problem-solving strategies which have successfully evolved over millennia whether you make bats, paint, or high-speed trains.

In the case of paint, the Sto Corporation mimicked the surface texture of lotus plants to reduce dirt’s ability to adhere to painted surfaces. With StoColor^® Lotusan^® dirt simply runs off the painted plane when hit by rain or other liquids. This reduces both expense and impacts from potential toxicity of cleaning agents to organisms coming in contact with them or being affected by them as they run into storm drains and waterways. And all by observing how a lotus leaf sheds dirt. As a very different example of age-old expertise, consider how kingfishers and owls influenced the makers of high-speed trains. In Japan, the highly successful Shinkansen line connects thousands of people to major cities as they commute to work each day. Unfortunately, the company was challenged by complaints of noise pollution resulting from the pantographs (overhead wires used to electrically power the trains) and the sonic booms caused by air compression as trains exited tunnels on their routes. By emulating the silencing feather structure of owls for the overhead wires and the elegant streamlined beak shape of kingfishers (who dive into water for their dinners causing nary a wave), Japan Railway West was able to bring noise levels down, increase speed by 10%, and reduce energy required for operation by 15%, thereby using fewer natural resources in the process. Win, win, and win. We can observe, adapt, emulate, and deploy nature’s strategies in new ways to do our work more efficiently and at less cost. We can create deeper partnerships and benefit numerous human and nonhuman communities through these partnerships by starting to ask, “How would a plant or bird solve this problem?” Indeed, what would an even broader examination of organisms and their strategies offer up to these questions?

Most of us are not instructed on the importance of or even possibilities present when we engage in partnership with Earth’s other inhabitants. If we are not schooled on what it actually takes to create a firm foundation, choices we are presented with in business are unclear or incomplete. Often the fate of wildlife or plant communities seems far away and disconnected from our day-to-day lives. Seldom are we taught that they not only provide us with those necessary two-by-fours, but that we are so tied to them we will either all prosper or eventually fail together. However, if we look carefully, these consultants can reveal whole new course books of knowledge that yield competitive advantage for our businesses. If we make a few adjustments to our practices and technologies to better engage with and protect what lies beyond our doors, both for our sakes and for theirs, we can participate in a higher form of partnership moving into reciprocity, which can yield a firmer foundation for business and for all life on Earth.

The element of reciprocity

In the years leading up to this book, I championed the idea of protecting nature for economic benefits gained from ecosystem services. This is a far different kind of partnership than encouraging nature’s protection simply for its right to be. Nature has already supplied an array of necessary elements to humans for survival. Should we not also work to ensure the survival of nature? That is the basis for reciprocity. The right for organisms to exist unmolested and have adequate, healthy land, water, or sky in which to do so wasn’t really a line of thought that was getting us far enough, fast enough to inspire business practices yielding positive results for nature in a scalable manner. And those two-by-fours supporting all of us have been weakening. In a way I’m still selling nature and the idea of developing new types of partnerships based on the benefits it provides to humans. It’s our starting line. However, now I include reciprocity with nature as an additional goal to share space and resources with those superstars of structure, processes, and systems.

Now I’m teaching students and business leaders about nature’s genius, a term coined by Janine Benyus in the late 1990s, and the mutual benefits all of us, humans and nonhumans alike, can derive from humans observing and adopting the strategies other organisms use as integral features of our businesses. After all, Lotusan^® and the bullet train both ultimately require less energy and materials to do their jobs. This is absolutely good for business and benefits our natural resources too. But to get to the heart of this approach, please think further about the difference between being or serving a consumer versus being or serving a citizen concerned with the broader well-being of friends, society, nature, and the world in general.

When I was younger, my dad carefully and repeatedly told me business and making a living are what drives society. Ever-increasing production, profits, and overall growth were what we were all taught to embrace. Being productive, according to Dad, meant being successful in business first. Caring for the environment could come afterward as a luxury based on the bounty of one’s bottom line. But what if caring and profiting could be reconciled – or at least made more compatible, I thought? What of reciprocity? Of citizenship?

Recently, I learned of a college instructor who asked his students how many of them were consumers.⁴ Every person raised a hand. When he asked how many of them were citizens, he saw a few hands sparsely dotting the room. As he pursued this point in discussion, certain values emerged. The students’ opinions seemed to converge on a common theme. In order to make a living under a consumer-driven model, the producer gains the “right” to deploy any means necessary to bring prices into the consumer’s range of acceptance. However, a citizen-driven model encompasses a broader notion of responsibility to the whole. And in case citizen itself is too narrow or loaded a term in today’s vernacular, we can extend it bey...