Finding inspiration from nature to conduct businesses is called biomimicry. This practice was popularized by Janine Benyus in the 1990s. It’s the act of learning from and mimicking nature’s design, strategies, and environments. For years, it has influenced top companies all over the world to innovate, be more sustainable, and revolutionize entire systems. Here’s how your business could grow with nature’s guidance.
Product Development
One of the standard steps to expanding your business is expanding your reach. Imagine if you have an audiology clinic. You’ve been helping people gain or regain their hearing abilities. You’ve been creating hearing aids, cochlear implants, and other devices to help people hear again.
To reach more people, you acquire hearing health (HH) clinics in various places around the country. It’s been great, you’re able to help more people in need. But you can always do more for them. One way is revolutionizing your hearing devices. And you can do that by taking inspiration from nature.
Biomimicry is finding a way to design hearing aids by taking inspiration from insects. Because hearing aids rely on microphones to amplify the sound around the person wearing them, scientists are working to improve those microphones. To do that, they’re examining how a female Ormia ochracea finds a male cricket to mate with through sound and vibration.
Management
As many of us understand, running a successful business is more than just creating innovative products that your target market truly needs. Your business management and work environment also have a significant impact on a business’ success. What you do is maintain a work environment that’s content and just. Your workers must be happy with the work that they’re doing.
Say, you run a publishing company where each individual has a specific task. Some of them are book agents assigned to their own writers. Some are graphic and layout artists assigned to different book projects. It seems that everyone is working in their own worlds.
You can cultivate a culture where people rely on each other to be successful by taking inspiration from fire ants. Fire ants may be small but they’re skilled survivalists. To survive a flash flood, they hold onto each other and create a nest. This nest that they built together keeps them afloat. Your employees can do the same by working on a goal together–in this case, a book project. Assign them to similar assignments so they can foster teamwork.
System
Once you’ve transformed how your employees work together, you can start thinking about your entire operation. This entails your network of suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors. By transforming your whole business operation, you can save more money, reach more customers, and even help the environment. And biomimicry can help with that.
Imagine if you run a textile factory where the latest fashionable clothing is made. You oversee all of the work from the cotton that’s been harvested from farms to the distribution of clothes to the retail stores. Yes, everything runs smoothly. But you can still always improve that.
To do so, you can look at how a forest survives on its own. Trees grow on their own from the amount of sunlight and rainwater that they get. They provide food and shelter for other creatures in the forest. But if they get uprooted and fall down because of a storm, they don’t go to waste. They can still provide shelter for animals. Thus, nothing goes to waste.
Your factory can do the same by using organic cotton for your textile. As a result, the waste that you produce is biodegradable. And, much like a forest, you can rely on sustainable energy such as solar.
As a business owner, you might find yourself struggling with making your company expand and grow. There are a couple of standard steps that you can take. You improve your marketing strategies. You expand your offices in other areas to reach more customers. But this may not be enough. You need something to make your business even more unique.
The good thing is that Mother Nature is always there to keep you inspired.
