In my new book, Jump the Curve, I advise executives interested in understanding where the future is headed to scan the biological world for inspiration. For some 4 billion years evolution has been busy at work at creating innovative solutions to some vexing problems. For example, salamanders can re-grow limbs, geckos can climb walls, and octupus’ can shape-shift their bodies to fit through small crevices. In their own way, each of these examples can be applied to products or inventions in order to improve life for humans.
It now appears that the world is about to be the beneficiary of an exponential explosion of biological information thanks to the new Encyclopedia of Life project which is seeking to put on-line information about every species known to mankind. According to this article, the first 30,000 pages will go up on the web tomorrow. More significantly, however, the project hopes to place an additional 1.77 million descriptions within the decade—a 59-fold increase!
In other words, within the decade there will be an exponential explosionof biological information from which to seek “bio-inspiration.”
Looking for more bits of inspiration from the animal kingdom? Check out these past posts:
Follow the Ants … or Not
To Survive … Change Diets
Swarm Intelligence Gets Even Smarter
Biomimickry at its Best
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
