What Do We Learn from Good Practices of Biologically Inspired Design in Innovation?

Pierre-Emmanuel Fayemi,Shoshanah Jacobs,Jacques Chirazi,Kristina Wanieck,Cordt Zollfrank

doi:10.3390/app9040650

Abstract

Biologically inspired design (BID) is an emerging field of research with increasing achievements in engineering for design and problem solving. Its economic, societal, and ecological impact is considered to be significant. However, the number of existing products and success stories is still limited when compared to the knowledge that is available from biology and BID research. This article describes success factors for BID solutions, from the design process to the commercialization process, based on case studies and market analyses of biologically inspired products. Furthermore, the paper presents aspects of an effective knowledge transfer from science to industrial application, based on interviews with industrial partners. The accessibility of the methodological approach has led to promising advances in BID in practice. The findings can be used to increase the number of success stories by providing key steps toward the implementation and commercialization of BID products, and to point out necessary fields of cooperative research.

Highlights

Learning from nature has a long history with a well-known potential for innovation and many success stories [1,2,3,4,5]
With this article we aimed to increase the understanding of the overall Biologically inspired design (BID) process and to assist designers in overcoming challenges described as the “valley of death”
We addressed various topics regarding the implementation of BID concepts and their market entry

Summary

Introduction

Learning from nature has a long history with a well-known potential for innovation and many success stories [1,2,3,4,5]. Several approaches and definitions exist [8,9], which describe learning from nature to solve technological or practical problems. Inspired design (BID) will be used in this article because we understand BID as an overarching term which describes the knowledge transfer from biology to technology in general. This affords us the opportunity to include a broad range of approaches related to learning from nature, with very limited exclusion [5]. We will give a first insight into examples of good practices with associated success stories, selected for our assessment of the ease of transfer to other approaches. We will use the terms biomimetics or biomimicry in particular, to respect the underlying definitions, motivations, and differences [5,10]

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion