I want to pick up on the comments from Adrian Marshall and James
Cunningham. Adrian pointed out the range of individual inventiveness,
from 'adapters' to 'discoverers'. I suspect that Biomimetics and
Biomimicry are in the 'innovators' or possibly 'early adopter' stage of
development, attracting people with the creativity and drive to overcome
the obstacles of new concepts and terminology. Janine Benyus described a
recent Biomimicry in Architecture course where architects were applying
peristaltic behavior of worms to design a new way of collecting and moving
urban runoff. I may be wrong, but I suspect the architects that attended
were strongly motivated to try new approaches.
Which leaves the rest of the pack - the majority who are more comfortable
with adaptive behavior or possibly technology transfer within disciplines
close to their own. As James described, developing and hybrid vocabulary
to bridge disciplines may end up frustrating all parties. Do we need to
not only incorporate biological effects in TRIZ, but also make the new
concepts available to the language that a practitioner is comfortable
with? Unfortunately, given the slow uptake of TRIZ in the western world,
I'm concerned that TRIZ may also be in the 'innovators' stage!
Or do we need a corps of translators who can facilitate two-way
communication?
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