One of the most interesting topics I’ve been reading up lately is biomimicry – the idea of creating materials, gathering energy, growing food the way that nature does. For example, when we make things these days – cars, kitchen utensils, diamond rings – the basic methodology is heat, beat, and treat. We build things by pounding on materials, or by starting with a big block of material and cutting away what we don’t want, or by melting something and pouring it into a mold. Our methods take a huge amount of energy, often are poisonous or take place at extremely high temperatures, make use of materials – plastics, metals – that have to be manufactured themselves, and are usually wasteful of materials.
Nature, on the other hand, starts with common raw materials like air, water, grass, dirt, sunlight, etc., and using extremely efficient processes, creates amazing things like spider silk (five times stronger than Kevlar), abalone shell nacre (also five times stronger than Kevlar, for that matter), chemical plants like kidneys and livers, and energy.
Scientists are working as fast and as hard as they can to learn how to build things like nature does, and a lot of them are making progress. Soon engineers and designers will be able to create novel new products that are built using the same techniques and the same raw materials as abalone shells, as spider silk, as us.
Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry
As I read the book, though, the question that went through my mind is how product management will happen in a biomimicry world. It’s very different from the world of software – although in many ways closer to software than it is to the traditional heat, beat, treat hardware world. Especially at first as the techniques are few and far between. For example, ok, I can make nacre. Now what do I do with it? It will be completely technology-driven. So the question is – I have a new technology that is really cool, and radically better than the currently available techniques – what do I do with it?
How do you prepare yourself as a PM for the day when there are eight or ten new technologies, based on biomimicry, in the world? You could argue that it doesn’t change what we do that much – it’s still about coming up with a product. We’re enabled to create different products by the availability of new technology. But we still have to decide what’s valuable to do with that technology, and we still have to create a whole product around the product we make. Simply being able to grow nacre is not that interesting – there are a lot of things in the world that I don’t need nacre to grow on, right?
Of course, biomimicry is not the only interesting new technology coming down the road. What about all the expected improvements in computer storage and processing? These are technology changes that provide order of magnitude improvements in the capabilities of our computers. That’s likely to mean something — and it’s coming pretty fast!
How can we as PMs and product designers and idea people come up with solutions that will make those new computers more than ten times as valuable – that is, I have a supercomputer amount of processing available on my laptop today, but all I do is run Word on it. Isn’t there something more valuable that I should be doing and even more so when I’ve got ten times as much power?
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