Global Business of Biodiversity

There's a useful event coming up in July at Excel in London, looking at the ways that businesses can more effectively engage with the business of making biodiversity happen. I'm chairing a session that EcoSapiens people might find interesting:

New Models for Business – Biomimicry, Innovation and Inspiration  

Chair:  Andy Middleton, Chairman of the TYF Group

Nature can and has inspired a huge number of innovations within business.  At the same time, increasing scarcity of resources and the need to manage them carefully is encouraging changes in business models and practices that can offer business opportunities.  This session explores a number of new business models that are emerging in response to the natural resource crisis with which we are faced.  In it business transformation and biomimicry experts explain, using examples from companies such as AkzoNobel, Nike and InterfaceFlor, how learning from nature can help future proof your business model during these turbulent times.

Lessons from nature, business innovation and future proofing
Giles Hutchins, Global Director, Head of Sustainability Solutions, Atos Origin

Biomimicry and inspirations for business
Denise de Luca, Project Lead, Swedish Biomimetics 3000 and Outreach Representative, the Biomimicry Institute

Infrastructure, architecture and the natural world
Michael Pawlyn, Director, Exploration

Product Innovation and the natural world
Nigel Stansfield, Director Product Design and Innovation, InterfaceFLOR

The employee challenge: inspiration and commitment through connecting with nature
Dave Hillyard, Director of International Partnerships, Earthwatch

Click here to find out more or register for the event

Winkipod

Geoff Brown and Belina Raffy are improv enthusiasts, using techniques from improv drama to help people find new ways of dealing with emergence and uncertainty through language and re-framing. I had the pleasure of recording a short podcast recently with Geoff and Belina that explores change, biomimicry and new ways of thinking about transformation - the winkipod is lovingly named after Winki Pop, a secret surf spot that's next door to the better known (and not as good) Bell's Beach in Victoria, Australia. Click here to listen.

Hay and Ivy

Yesterday I had the pleasure of chairing the Welsh Assembly Government's launch of their new Sustainable Development Charter at the Hay Literary Festival, which was given a neat lift by Revel Guest's comment that it was the most important of the 500 or so events on at Hay this year.

Our discussions on Friday, and next week at our Hay on Earth workshops will be focused on defining the 'Real 10' goals that will be needed to step up to the opportunities of the future. What percentage of employees would I want engaged in understanding the need for radical change? How about 85%. What percentage of managers need to have carbon and ecological measures in their performance targets? 100%. How many businesses that get support from government will have to demonstrate capability to reduce carbon emissions dramatically? All.

There was a lovely article on nature on the BBC website this week, looking at the way ivy sticks itself to walls. An extract from the article is pasted below; my thoughts on how this might be relevant to making change are in italics.

First, the plant makes initial contact with the object it will climb. It's important to know what 'making contact' actually means for the organisations or individuals that we're trying to connect with. How we know that they've noticed?

This then triggers the second phase, when the plant's roots change shape to fit the surface of the structure they will climb. Perhaps communication or information exchange consciously change once a relationship is established.

The roots alter their arrangement to increase their area of contact with the wall. More people are introduced by both parties to increase the width of the relationship so that it no longer depends on just a couple of people.

Small structures called root hairs grow out from the root, coming into contact with the climbing surface. Specific actions start to happen that make the relationship more permanent - more depth to the knowledge that connects both parties.

The plant then excretes a glue to anchor it to the substrate. Contracts...

Finally, the tiny root hairs fit into tiny cavities within the climbing surface. Filling our opportunities that lock the relationship solidly against disturbance.

There, they dry out, scrunching into a spiral-shape that locks the root hair into place. Physical structures such as working in each others' office space, locks the relationship into place.

The ivy's attachment is further strengthened by hook-like structures that grow on the tips of the root hairs. Personal relationships strengthen the business relationship



Turtle learning

n an posting today, the BBC featured the discovery of the way in which the common musk turtle 'breathes' with a tongue coverered in specialist 'buds'.

Discoveries such as this show the importance of looking after nature for its own sake and so that we can learn the 'how' of secrets such as this so that they might benefit us too, before yet another species is consigned to a watery extinction.

Biomimicry, anyone?



Thoreau on biomimicry

“I make it my business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and the earth.” (Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1817-1862)