How can you overcome the barriers to sustainable innovation?

1. Understanding complex systems
The natural world and its biodiversity are complex and interconnected. For instance, a beehive or ant colony operates through intricate communication networks and shared labour. Emulating these systems requires a deep understanding of these interactions, which can take time. Without a comprehensive understanding of these systems, attempts to mimic them could oversimplify their complexity, leading to ineffective or inefficient applications.

Tools like AI, computer modelling and simulation can help simplify and visualise these complexities. Leveraging insights from different scientific and technical fields can also provide the broader knowledge needed to understand how systems operate in nature.

2. Interdisciplinary collaboration
Biomimicry typically requires knowledge from diverse fields such as biology, ecology, engineering and design. This calls for effective interdisciplinary collaboration, which can be challenging due to differences in terminology, methodologies and perspectives.

Organisations can mitigate this challenge by assembling project teams that include scientists, engineers, designers and business leaders to foster collaboration and open communication. Using digital collaboration platforms can also promote and support interdisciplinary conversations.

3. Achieving scale
In nature, solutions have evolved to ideally equip organisms for the habitat and processes in which they exist, often in distinct and defined geographic scales. The challenge arises when we apply the same concepts to different scales.

This issue can be addressed by integrating principles of nanotechnology and materials science, and encouraging further research into how natural processes and designs can be applied at different scales. By leveraging the precise control and manipulation of nanoscale structures and materials, we can replicate nature’s remarkable features and functions with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency.
This integration enables us to scale up biomimetic designs, enhance performance and develop advanced technologies to address complex modern challenges in energy, medicine and sustainability.

4. Patenting and intellectual property (IP)
Traditional intellectual property (IP) rights frameworks often struggle to accommodate biomimicry. It’s unclear who should own the rights to designs inspired by nature, and there are ethical considerations around profiting from these designs. Additionally, patenting a design that mimics a natural system or organism can be hard because the patent office might consider it a discovery rather than an invention.

To mitigate this, we must revisit our patent systems and IP rights to accommodate biomimicry better. By obtaining patents for biomimetic designs and technologies inspired by nature, innovators gain legal protection and exclusive rights to their inventions. This incentivises research and development efforts, encouraging investment and fostering collaboration among scientists, engineers and businesses.

Patenting IP safeguards the financial interests of inventors and promotes knowledge sharing, enabling the dissemination of biomimetic solutions and spurring further innovation.

5. Ethics and sustainability
There are ethical questions about how far humans should go in manipulating natural designs for our purposes. While biomimicry is often hailed as a pathway towards more sustainable practices, ensuring that our actions do not unintentionally damage the ecosystems we’re learning from is crucial.

Ethical guidelines should be developed and integrated into biomimicry practices. This should include principles for environmental stewardship and respect for the rights of local communities and Indigenous Peoples.