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Business Lessons from Mother Nature |
| By Straits Times Recruit |
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Can't see the forest for the trees? Get in touch with the natural world and you may get some useful insights. |
How can business profit from nature? In the old economy, businesses grew wealthy from nature by controlling and conquering it; by extracting from it to make products that people could sell and buy.
In the new economy, nature's real value lies in the lessons it teaches. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned what works, what is appropriate and what endures. Nature is a gigantic storehouse of principles and innovations that corporations can tap to build more profitable and sustainable businesses. |
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Innovations |
Over the course of human history, nature has inspired man to numerous inventions or innovations. Here are some examples: |
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Lessons |
Besides inspiring ground-breaking research, nature can also teach us valuable business lessons, though some of these may initially seem counter-intuitive. Here are some examples: |
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Discover more than invent. Through its evolution, nature takes what's already available and adapts and develops solutions in new and unexpected ways. New products or ideas can be developed through recombining existing, proven approaches instead of pioneering substantially newer technologies. Of a million patents analysed in one study, over 90 per cent were variations on solutions already in existence, often from within the same industry. |
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Make many mistakes: Nature knows when to work and when to play. Kestrel, a type of bird, hunts only from 9am to noon and again from 3 to 5 pm. All animals play, explore and make many mistakes, but they always learn from them. At Japanese car-maker Honda, 90 per cent of R&D projects fail, but most are recombined into successful new projects later. High levels of failure are not only inevitable, they should be mandatory. Instead, many organisations still regard failure as taboo. |
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Make your competitors successful: Cooperation is a great source of innovation in evolution and is recognised by biologists as being more important than competition. Creating the pie is often cooperative, while dividing it up tends to be competitive. However, the whole ecosystem has to flourish for business to grow, and that means businesses need healthy competitors. |
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Insights |
In the tropical rainforest, for example, plants and animals are subjected to a range of limitations that impact on their survival. However, through the course of evolution, these plants and animals have adapted themselves not only to survive but thrive under such limitations.
One powerful approach to promote learning from nature is known as EcoMapping™. It draws inspiration from the natural world to help people seek solutions for innovations and business. One of EcoMapping™'s activities is to take participants on a guided expedition through a tropical rainforest with an experienced nature guide. They are asked to observe and record what they perceive as limitations and adaptations in nature. They will later correlate these findings to a personal, organisational or business situation, deriving models and principles for themselves.
To a participant, the diverse species of trees, for example, may reflect the need for biological diversity in order to survive the fungus-filled tropical forest. He or she may associate this with a need for business diversification in the corporate world in order to survive in the business jungle. Another participant might interpret the situation as a case of not putting all your eggs in one basket.
The themes are numerous. Anything from bio-diversity, pollination, seed dispersal, predator and prey relationship to symbiotic relationships, can be used to kickstart the process of EcoMapping™.
This article first appeared in ST Recruit on 31 Oct 2003.
For information about our ECO Adventure Challenge click here |
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