Nature as Business Model

Biomimicry works for profit too!

Nature has many prototypes we can learn from, such as this natural floating island in Wisconsin.

Nature is the ultimate inventor. She has more prototypes under her belt than any other inventor, and we call it “evolution.” And evolution, which includes prototype development and testing, takes time. Not necessarily human scale time either.

Nature as Model is biomimicry. Nature as business model is something different again, but fundamental in several critical respects.

We humans can be short sighted. Over the last hundred years, immediate gratification has been the rule. We look for short-term ROI. In fact, having completed a Crowd Funded equity raise, and tracked the occasional queries from a few hundred investors, I can’t help chuckling as I recount the several queries from one such investor. “When can I sell my shares? When can I make a profit?” Note, this individual had invested all of one hundred dollars.

I recall visiting a ranch in North Dakota, called the TTT Ranch—the Things Take Time Ranch. An engineer professor/friend and I were on a pheasant hunt, and this ranch was being stewarded towards a blend of strategic wildlife habitat and, more-or-less, conventional agriculture. Well, at the time, we were a bit short on the shotgunning skill side of the equation, so the harvest of pheasants was not very impressive. But the stewardship around wildlife resulted in other forms of wildlife, like turkey. So our bag included an eighteen pound Tom turkey, and lifelong memories of friendship along with my introduction to Calypso music while driving across the great plains during the wee hours!

The TTT Ranch was an object lesson for me, and helped me appreciate the future work associated with what we do here at the Shepherd Research Center, which had been a sugar beet farm in its previous life. Now it is a hotbed of innovation. Prototype development! And Nature as Business Model is a key element.

Yes, today’s effort towards proving out a sixty-year design life for BioHavens is a transition towards Nature as Business Model. Solar BioHaven can be a steppingstone towards true sustainable business practice. We can use recycled plastic in a biofilm reactive surface area design to concentrate nature’s wetland effect. We ultimately, can grow fish instead of algae. Instead of Harmful Algae Bloom. This is Nature as Business Model in practice.

I’m not being particularly direct and clear. But here is the bottom line, from my perspective. Humans need to adjust their perspective. We must transition. We must become more thoughtful, and far more patient. Every investor needs to view their investment from a historical perspective. Buy short, sell long, or so to speak.

As investment tracks with Transition Water, the productivity, the ROI around water, can be remarkably rewarding! Nature as Business Model will become the premier Fortune 500 theme!