When business leaders meet botanists
By: Mike Saunders - 06/07/2010
Find out what happened when we decided to invite a diverse group of business leaders to Kew for the day – mixing business people with botanists.
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The idea of products or buildings being inspired by nature is well established – you need think no further than Sydney Opera House or cat’s eyes for a couple of examples. But it’s not so easy to think of businesses that have been shaped by nature.
Because we believe in the huge potential of businesses being shaped by nature, we decided to invite a diverse group of business leaders to Kew for the day – to see what happens when you mix business people with botanists.
The results were exciting, stimulating and quite different from anything tried before. As well as having one of the world’s top plant scientists explain how different plants have developed resilience to their surroundings, the attendees worked in teams with plant experts, using individual plant species as an inspiration for new approaches to business.
Business leaders and botanists outside the Alpine House at Kew
Some of the inspiring plant stories that were discussed by the groups were the Livingstone potato (Plectranthus esculentus), Aloe vera, a mushroom and the Callicarpa pentandra tree. Summary notes from these discussions, and slides from the day are available here for download.
Tags: clever | extraordinary | healing | valuable
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About this blog
'Business Inspired by Nature' is an emergent, resilient, dynamic new collective of individuals with a unique combination of skills, experiences and insights. We have a common goal of creating a healthy vibrant world by bridging business and biology, in other words, ecological thinking for radical transformation. We aim to transform industrial supply chains into business ecosystems, and to merge business ecosystems into natural ecosystems.
'Business Inspired by Nature's' collaboration of professional change agents, biologists and design professionals work with clients to apply nature's principles to business products, processes and systems.
- If you’d like to publish material from this blog in a separate publication, please get in touch with Kew’s Press Office at pr@kew.org. See our full Terms & Conditions here.
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