Biomimicry as Journey vs Destination

Posted: October 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Biomimicry Methodology, Strategic Research and Innovation | Tags: , , , , , , | 6 Comments

The two personalities are required for productive innovation, and are of course an integrated part of creative process, but they don't always play well together. Note: you could easily replace biomimicry with innovation for the following conversation.

Last week I had an “ah-ha” moment around questions of teaching and consulting biomimicry. It became apparent through conversations with architects, project managers and design students that there are two different “audiences” or “practitioners” of biomimicry (or innovation in general), and consequently two different ways of approaching them.

Explorers – Biomimicry as journey

Explorers are people who don’t care where they end up, and are passionate enough to dive in the deep end without seeing what’s below the surface. They are hungry for process and enjoy the experience of growing, learning and evolving. These maybe companies looking for transformative change, or individuals looking for personal growth.

The experiences explorers are looking for challenge them conceptually and personally. These are often candidates for biomimicry fanaticism,  i.e. whole hearted true faith in biomimicry as a solution to every human challenge.

Executor – Biomimicry as destination

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Research Resource

Posted: June 15, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Research Resources | Tags: , | 1 Comment

Shaping Tomorrow, foresight research resource

It ain’t pretty, but there’s a lot of content.

I was recently introduced to this incredible research resource called “Shaping Tomorrow”. Apparently it has only recently become accessible to for free to a general audience, and now the enormous database of information is available to anyone who signs up.

The website has 1000s of authors, academics and professional researchers that all contribute content around key areas of research. The content is then tagged with a range of different “forecasting” information to identify the strength of the “signal” and the forecasted impact, immediate or future. This is all an emerging language for me, and Shaping Tomorrow has a bunch of resources that I’m beginning to go through to help educate you to use the site. There is also a service for companies to order reports of specific research, or to create personal feeds around desired topics.

I’m looking forward to exploring deeper.