'Billions of years of innovation freely available in nature.'
Ylva Poelman is an expert in (bio-inspired) innovation and future-proofing. She studied natural sciences and astronomy and works as a consultant, coach, author, and speaker.
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Ylva Poelman is an inspiring speaker who will undoubtedly make you look at things in a completely different way.
Ylva is an innovation expert and helps companies become more future-proof. She specializes in bio-inspired innovation (biomimicry, bionics) and plays a pioneering role in the Netherlands. This innovation method is most well-known for technical applications, but according to Ylva, it can also be effectively applied to other areas, such as social-organizational innovation, leadership, marketing, and strategy. In this, she takes on a leading role globally.
Under the title ‘The Bionic Woman’, Ylva published more than a hundred columns about examples of bio-inspired innovation in the newspaper Trouw. She also wrote the books ‘The 9 Success Factors of Company Nature – Survival Guide for Businesses’ and ‘Nature as Inventor – Billions of Years of Innovation Freely Available’. Additionally, she was a co-author of the book ‘Leadership in the Digital World – Being Prepared for Tomorrow’. Furthermore, Ylva offers tailored lectures and workshops for conferences, events, companies, and educational institutions on innovation and bio-inspired innovation, applied to a wide range of fields: from (medical) technology.
A high-speed train with a kingfisher nose, self-managing teams inspired by starlings, self-cleaning lotus paint, and survival strategies of organisms as business strategies: these and many other remarkable innovations are inspired by nature. Nature has been in operation for nearly four billion years and has extensively experimented with what works and what doesn’t. The list of clever inventions is virtually inexhaustible. For all our challenges, there is an equivalent in nature, and we can fully learn from the ingenious solutions that nature has found.
Bio-inspired innovation is a practical innovation method that uses nature as a source of inspiration for out-of-the-box innovations and even breakthrough innovations. This innovation method, also known as bionics and biomimicry, views nature as a catalogue of brilliant, well-functioning, and unconventional solutions, which can be consulted entirely free of charge and patent-free.
The changes, transitions, and crises are coming at us fast, making it difficult for companies to survive. Organisations that want to become more future-proof can turn to an unconventional source of inspiration, which has made ‘survival’ an art: the biological nature, the most future-proof entity we know.
Nature, when considered closely, actually functions as a company. This company, the Ltd Nature, produces organisms in all shapes and sizes, provides all sorts of services, and has various business processes. And if anything illustrates its future-proofing, it is its long existence. Despite the many (catastrophic) changes it has faced, it has been in continuous operation for roughly 4 billion years: an impressive success story.
Energy transitions, information revolutions, climate change, technological revolutions, innovation, diversity, self-management, leadership, fake news, circular economy, the Ltd Nature has dealt with it all before. The parallels with the major challenges of our time are therefore readily available. Moreover, the Ltd Nature – thanks to its 9 success factors – will continue to function successfully for millions of years, with or without us. This makes the Ltd Nature a great source of inspiration for companies and organisations.
In this rapidly changing and uncertain world, companies and organisations cannot do without adaptability and innovation. Both adaptability and innovation are success factors of the Ltd Nature. Adaptability helps companies survive in the short term, innovation in the somewhat longer term.
Nature thinks in terms of opportunities, sees transitions as possibilities to explore new markets through innovation, and is not afraid to cannibalise its own products. Companies and organisations often have more difficulty with this. Moreover, innovation should not be a one-time event but a continuous process, embedded in the DNA of the organisation. Three things are important in this regard: culture, culture, and culture.
Leadership is not a human ‘invention’; it existed in nature before humans appeared on the scene. All animals living in social groups have a form of leadership. The variation in leadership styles is enormous: it ranges from despotism, like the proverbial monkey rock, to democratic decision-making where voting takes place and everything in between. Self-organisation has also existed for millions of years in nature, and the rules to make it function well have been fully crystallised.
Leadership among humans is more complicated than among other animals because we work in formal organisations, where wage-work relationships and associated authority structures exist. Moreover, we have stereotypical images of leaders. Among non-human social animals, none of this plays a role, allowing us to gain an understanding of what leadership originally revolves around, which Ylva calls ‘Back to basic leadership’.
Both companies and organisms have a strategy to survive. Both have limited resources and must therefore make strategic choices about what to do and what not to do. Nature has extensively experimented with which strategies work well under which circumstances and which do not, making it a good source of inspiration for business strategies.
In technical terms, bio-inspired innovation can be seen as ‘reverse engineering nature’. All aviation pioneers, for example, have looked at flying birds, bats, and seeds to design their own flying machines. Sensors also have a clear biological counterpart: senses.
Organisms are integrated multi-sensor measurement and control systems, function autonomously, are adaptive, and equipped with smart materials, and maintain, clean, and repair themselves. In short, they offer everything we seek in smart systems. Moreover, senses often outshine our sensors because they are smaller, more robust, more energy-efficient, and more sensitive.
But it doesn’t stop at obvious analogies. All technical challenges we face also occur in some way in nature. There, the problems have already been solved and are also ‘proven technology’: if it didn’t work well, the species would have long been extinct.
Eat or be eaten. That is the image many people have of nature. But nothing could be further from the truth. There is much more collaboration than there is mutual struggle: from the many tiny cells in our body, which together make us human, to large ecosystems maintained by the (unconscious) collaboration of numerous organisms. Collaboration is one of the success factors of the Ltd Nature, and there is much to learn from it, whether it is about collaborating within a team or companies working together on innovation.
Diversity is also a success factor of the Ltd Nature and essential for companies that want to survive. Diversity policy is therefore not about steering towards numbers to ensure all groups are represented. That completely misses the added value of heterogeneity. Diversity should not be a goal in itself but rather seen as a crucial means to address the many challenges current organisations face.
Nature is the inventor of sustainability. If the Ltd Nature had not been sustainable, we would not exist now. Additionally, nature has dealt with many climate and environmental changes and survived them all. A statement like ‘we must be good to the earth’, although well-intentioned, shows some arrogance. Our planet and nature have always managed perfectly well without humans, and they will continue to do so. In short, nature is not pitiable and does not need to be saved. It is strong and powerful and will continue in whatever form. There are valuable lessons to be drawn from this for our own survival and that of our companies and organisations.
What we actually mean by the statement is that we should not ruin it for ourselves and ensure that nature can continue to support us. Nature will – thanks to its 9 success factors – continue in whatever form. The only question is whether that will be with or without us humans. Nature can do perfectly well without humans, but humans cannot do without nature.
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