Biomimicry is the practice of learning from and then emulating life’s best ideas to create a more sustainable world. By mimicking nature's time-tested strategies, biomimics are learning to capture fog like a desert beetle, preserve vaccines like a resurrection fern, resist bacteria like a shark, and gather energy like a leaf. Based on 3.8 billion of years of R&D, these designs sip energy, shave material use, eliminate toxins, and turn waste into opportunities.

Once a specialty science, Biomimicry has spread virally in the last 15 years. Hundreds of Biomimicry start-ups are making headlines with nature-inspired technologies that solve global challenges and disrupt business as usual. Leading companies such as Natura, Arup, Airbus, Boeing, HOK, IDEO, Interface, Levi’s, and Nike use biomimicry in their labs as well as their boardrooms, finding inspiration for product and management redesign.

Since the publication of her seminal book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus and her colleagues at Biomimicry 3.8 have developed a methodology for bio-inspired design while introducing millions to its potential. They’ve worked with over 250 corporate clients and professors from more than 100 universities to embed biomimicry in both design and decisionmaking. They’ve been “biologists at the design table” with some of the world’s greatest innovators, reimagining everything from solar manufacture to city planning. In this talk, Janine will give an insider’s view of the latest biomimicry advances on the drawing board and in the market. She’ll discuss the worldwide spread of the meme, and how it is being heralded as a “one of the top 20 breakthrough business ideas” (Harvard Business Review, HBR List), “a paradigm shift for the world of design” (Smithsonian National Design Awards), and “one of 10 innovations that will change the way you manufacture” (Society of Manufacturing Engineers). At this critical tipping-point for the field, she’ll describe what’s needed to take biomimicry global while cultivating ethical thought leadership that will focus Biomimicry on what’s worth doing. Come learn what all the excitement is about from the founder of this practical, radical, and powerfully hopeful approach to innovation. Hear what happens when inventors become nature’s apprentices, creating world-changing technologies that create conditions conducive to all Life.