Using Nature as Inspiration for Innovative Design, with the Biomimicry Institute

Okay, we are now live. Welcome everybody. Let's see, I see the first few participants starting to trickle in. Hello. If you're joining us now, you comment in the chat, please tell us what country or city you're coming from. Always like to hear where, you know, people are joining us from today. My name is Dustin Betts. I am the content editor at the Founder Institute. And here with us today is Jared Yarnell Shane. He's the Entrepreneurship Director at the Biomimicry Institute. Really quickly, if you're not familiar with the Founder Institute, we're the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. We've helped launch over 4,000 companies across over 200 cities and 6 continents. If you're interested in learning more about the Founder Institute, we're currently enrolling for cities across all 6 continents, and you can see the list of enrolling cities at fi.co/enrolling. Intro today, we're gonna be talking about biomimicry, bit of a different topic for us, but really exciting. Biomimicry, we're gonna explore it in detail, but it's really an approach to innovation that's looking to nature as a potential for innovation and solutions to human problems, and sort of applying design thinking by mimicking principles and processes in nature. So our speaker today, as I mentioned, Jared Yarnallshane, he is the Entrepreneurship Director at the Biomimicry Institute, where he focuses on commercializing biomimicry-based innovations. And before joining Biomimicry, Jared ran programs with the Penn State University's incubator and accelerator programs, and was also the program director at Thought for Food, which is an agtech and foodtech competition and accelerator launch program for young entrepreneurs. Jared's worked directly with hundreds of social impact startups from across the world, and he's helped secure a combined $25+ million in funding for those companies along the way. Jared, thanks so much for joining us today.

Awesome. Thank you, Dustin. It's great to be here. And Dustin and I started a company together several years ago. So I'm excited to be back here chatting with you.

Yeah, great. Yeah, we don't have to talk about that, but we can at the end if you want. At any rate, yes, Jared and I also go way back. So the agenda for today is we're going to have— Jared's going to present a slide deck. We're going to have like a kind of introduction to biomimicry and how it's used practically. In product design, where we're going to explore different case studies, um, of products that have been developed by companies through using biomimicry. And then we're going to have plenty of time for audience Q&A. So please remember, this is for you. If you're watching this live, we're doing this for you. So please don't be shy, put your questions into the chat. And we have somebody from our team who's monitoring the chat and feeding the questions over to us. So we will get to your biomimicry questions. Don't be shy with those. Um, All questions welcome. So without further ado, Jared, you want to kick it off for us here with your presentation, and I'll mute myself for a while while you run through your deck.

All right, sounds good. Thank you, Dustin. Thanks for having us here. Let me start up my deck. All right. Good to go? All righty. Well, thanks everyone for joining. Before we dive into the meat of the presentation, I just wanted to ask you all, What do you think this is a picture of? I'll give you a few seconds. Type in your guess in the chat. Let's see, what do you think this is a picture of? It's welding. That's a good guess. Let's see, any other guesses here? It's something living. I'll give you a hint. Hey, there we go. Someone got it. It's a peacock feather. So here you can see the peacock. We're zooming out. So that's a close-up of a peacock feather. And I show that because it shows this such intricacy that exists in our natural world and it shows some brilliant vibrant colors. Something though that I think is really unique is that those feathers are actually pigmented brown. So what we're seeing is wavelengths of light being reflected back in the green and blue and kind of that gold spectrum. So there's no blue or green pigments involved. And I share that because of this quote. So there's a group called Cradle to Cradle which is one of the— it's a licensing company, or not a licensing company, a certification company that certifies products' life cycle and lifespan. And one of the issues with color, at least color how we normally do it, and humans do it, I should say, is we use pigments. So we use chlorine, bromide, these toxic elements and chemicals that are bad for humans. So There's this quote that we can't make a green green, which is kind of ironic, at least not when we use pigments. But what if we didn't use pigments? What if we made color just like the peacock makes color or other animals make color? So you see here, this is the cypress morpho butterfly, and that brilliant blue color is caused by a similar phenomenon that you saw on that peacock. It's called structural color. So it's how these nanoscales these microscopic structures reflect back wavelengths of light. Without those microscopic structures, this butterfly would just look brown and be really ugly. Well, why is this important? Well, if we know in the natural world that really there's not many safe blue or green pigments, yet it's a color that we love, can we as humans recreate color in that same way? Can we make structural color? And my answer is yes, there's a company based out of Berkeley called Cypress Materials that has found a way to make this color. They mimic nature to make structural color. So what you're seeing here is they spray paint on and it's clear. And over the course of just a few seconds, a few minutes, it self-assembles and it starts to reflect back wavelengths of light. And this is made with two materials. So they have two materials that they mix together into a paint binder, and based on the ratio of materials, they can tune the color to work across the visible light spectrum, and it can also work in the UV and the infrared light spectrum. Now, this is really cutting-edge science technology. It was actually developed in the Berkeley lab that won a Nobel Prize for their chemistry work, so this is really, this is really advanced stuff, but Imagine the possibilities. We could have cars that now don't have the heavy metal pigments that make them have that brilliant color, but it's just the sunlight reflecting off that causes that. Because it works in the infrared spectrum, they can paint a coat that looks clear to humans onto windows or onto roof tiles, roof shingles, and it will reflect back infrared heat, which can reduce heating and cooling loads on buildings by up to 20%. So huge cost savings. And the best part is there's these two materials that make up their paint, and they can do this at a cost that's cheaper than paint that we have now. So I'm sharing all this as it's a complex, but I think it's a beautiful example of what biomimicry is. And like Dustin mentioned in the beginning, it's a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges. I like to break it down into the Greek language, which is where it was derived from, where we have bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate or to mimic. So what we're gonna show, I have a couple more examples to show some biomimicry solutions in action, but I also want to share some tools with you as we go throughout the presentation that you might be able to apply to bring into your own startup, or you might be able to apply to bring into your own startup ecosystem. To help your, your companies really get a head start on their competition. And biomimicry is important not only because of its ability to kind of rapidly advance innovation, but, but for several other reasons as well. So I already talked about the emulate, I already talked about the structural color phenomena that we see on species. But what we are looking for at the Biomimicry Institute is also this deep ethos. So what I mean by that is, in the natural world, we have circular systems.

You—

plants receive energy from the sun, they use living material and inert material, organic material on the earth to grow, and then that's decomposed and it's recycled and used over and over again. That doesn't exist in our man-made built environment. In the natural world, coral can grow without the need for heat treatment. They actually sequester carbon as they grow their structures that are similar to concrete instead of producing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So what we believe is if we can learn from nature to mimic nature, we are on the path to sustainability. We can radically redesign our world It might not look that much different, but it's going to be better for our planet and better for us as a species. And the other aspect of biomimicry that I think is just so critically important is this ability to reconnect. So you can see we're having a startup presentation about nature. You're learning hopefully some biology facts. I'm not a biologist or a naturalist, but I'm an engineer and a startup, uh, guy. I've had my own companies, but there's this beautiful aspect of how do we reconnect to our natural world as we go through this innovation process. So I want to share another example of a company that I think really shows how we can encapsulate all three of those things. And I'm going to start by showcasing this coastal construction. So most of you have probably seen marinas or other coastal areas where they have these kind of concrete pilons, and they kind of look like jacks. The issue, you know, we're building these to protect humans. We're building these to protect our ports, our ships, our coastline. And as climate change happens, as sea levels rise, as extreme weather events rise, we're going to need more of this protection. But an issue is that this is also killing the local ecosystems that they're coming in and kind of replacing. And it's killing it for multiple reasons, some of which are that the concrete itself is kind of a poison. Plants, animals, bacteria, they can't really grow on the concrete. The concrete's also, you can see here, extremely smooth. And in nature, there's really not smooth rock surfaces. Like, you know, you might find that in riverbeds, but along coastline, you're gonna have nooks and crannies and crevices and holes. And you also, if you think about coastline, at least natural coastline, you're gonna have things like tide pools and other kind of features, macro design features that plants and animals can live in. So this company, E-Concrete, they're based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. It was founded by two marine biologists who saw this. They saw how human-built construction came in and decimated ecosystems. And then they started to ask questions. Well, why does this kill those species? What can we learn from the natural world to make this a design that is not only beneficial for humans, but also beneficial for the local environment? And you can see they have that macro-scale structure here on the left. They also have— they design in flaws in the concrete product. So there's holes and nooks and crannies that things can attach to. And then finally, they also have a proprietary admix, a concrete admix that is life-friendly. So it actually attracts life instead of kills life. And the result is here on the left, or on the other side of the screen, you can see their product that's been in place for less than a year. You can see it covered in marine growth. And the best part is Actually, because it attracts this marine growth, these structures get stronger over time. It kind of bioprotects itself. So think about like seashells and other things that they're, they're these hard kind of calcium carbonate substances. As they grow, it actually strengthens the structure, which again makes this cost competitive. While their initial product is a little bit more upfront, the lifespan of the product and the fact that they meet environmental regulations makes them competitive in the market. And I just wanted to mention that both E-Concrete and Cypress Materials, they both have products on the market. These aren't things that are kind of in a research lab. These are both real companies that exist today. And here are the two founders. So we worked with E-Concrete, and this is Shimrit and Ido, the two founders, in our $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize competition. At the Biomimicry Institute, we run a number of different programs that help support nature-inspired innovation and biomimetic innovation. We start at a really young age. We have programs that actually bring this concept of nature-inspired design into classrooms. Right now, it's an optional activity that teachers and students can do as part of the Youth Design Challenge, but we're actually working within the California State School District to bring this in and NEAT Next Gen Science Standards so that hopefully your middle schoolers and high schoolers in the US are not only going to learn about an organism in biology, but they could also learn from that organism and actually create a design based on what they're learning. So we think that we have to start reaching our future designers and engineers at an early age and start kind of bringing this thought process of, you know, nature, this is warehouse of information. How can we make our world a better and safer place? So moving along our program timeline, next program we have is our Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. And this is one that I think you all might be interested in. This is where we provide resources and materials that help college-age students, university students, and young professionals bring biomimicry into the world. We help them walk through our design process and also provide some resources to help them along the way. And then we have our Launchpad, which is an early-stage incubator that's specifically for design challenge participants. And then the Ray of Hope Prize. So the Ray of Hope Prize, it's a $100,000 prize competition that we run in partnership with the Ray C. Anderson Foundation. And Ray Anderson was the founder of Interface Carpet Tile. It's a multi— it's a billion-dollar company. And they're actually one of the first companies to make a carbon neutral or carbon negative pledge, which they made back in the '90s, actually, in early 2000s. And as a textile manufacturer, it's really incredible that they've been able to meet a lot of their goals. And a big reason they did that was because of their practice of bringing biomimicry into their design table. So Interface, they had a mandate to go out into the forest and look at the forest floor, because everyone loves seeing beautiful fall leaves on the forest floor. And what they learned was that in nature, the forest floor, it's a random pattern. There's no kind of dictation about this leaf goes here, this leaf goes here, it's random. And they brought that randomness into their carpet design and it's been their top seller ever since. And then our last program, and this is kind of the backbone, our spine, so to speak, behind all the programs is Ask Nature. If you go to asknature.org, we have a website where you kind of have this search bar. You can type in things like waterproof as an example, and we'll show you how plants and animals keep themselves dry. So this is great for designers, startups, engineers who might be— have a design challenge that they're trying to figure out. A great example was there was a group we were working with from MIT who they had a soft-bodied robot that was trying to navigate through water pipes. But you can't see things in a water pipe and you don't— can't really have control of it. So what they found were that there's these fish called the blind cave fish. So fish that can't see that navigate based on pressure differentials. So knowing that, they actually integrated pressure differential sensors into the robot so that it could control where it was going and work its way through the pipe. Another great thing about this is that we have a system of information and hierarchy that you can go through. So if you go in and look at Ask Nature strategy pages, I want you to look on the left here. Let's say you're a farmer, or let's say you're starting a new agricultural company, maybe it's a vertical farm, and you want to protect your crops from physical harm. So you could click on that, that button there, Protect from Physical Harm. And let's say we were facing a problem with fungus. You could pick, we want to protect from living threats, and then we want to protect from fungi. And then all of a sudden, all of these different strategies and solutions pop up that already exist in the natural world. And we curate this information. This is, this is coming from academic research. What we do is we, we scour kind of the academic journals and work with our science communication team to translate that into language that's appropriate for a more general audience and appropriate for engineers and startups. So I want to share with you an example of a company that's doing this. So notice over here we have chemicals in oregano act as a fungicide. We have a video explaining that here. So let's see. All right, I'm going to try to play this.

Right until you sink your teeth into them, fresh fruit and vegetables are at risk from fungal infection. And this is a big nuisance to fruit producers, who lose around 25% of fruit to fungi spoilage each year. That's even after the use of synthetic fungicides, which are the go-to solution for this problem. But the use of these chemicals is problematic. They have negative effects on both the health of humans and the environment, adversely impact honeybee pollination, and are easily washed away from plants. And because many have a single mode of action, fungi can mutate and develop resistance to them over time. But many plants have evolved their own natural defences. For example, plants like oregano produce compounds which have antifungal properties. These can be extracted easily and used as natural fungicides. However, their use is limited because they break down quickly within the environment. To overcome this, the company Nanomik has collected a range of these compounds and encapsulated them in tiny biological containers. This protects the compounds from being broken down and helps them to attach to plants. If the fruits are attacked by fungi, the pH of the plant's surface becomes more acidic, and this causes the capsules to break open and release their contents, which quickly kills the fungi. The best bit is that Nanomik's plant-powered products have been demonstrated to be more effective than synthetic fungicides. And because they're derived from plants, they're safe for humans and the environment, keeping your fruit fresh and tasty for longer.

So I just, I love that. I come from an agricultural and kind of food background with some of my past work, so I think a couple things stand out for me with this company. They're based in Turkey, they came out of Istanbul, and they actually, the two founders learned that their grandparents and their great-grandparents used to dip harvested produce into oregano oil to preserve it. And as they kind of advanced through university and started to examine, they started to ask the question, well, why did that work? And what they discovered were these molecules. And, you know, their unique IP, their unique intellectual property, is the encapsulation that goes around those molecules. And they're doing that, they're looking at this now with a lot of other plants as well. We couldn't cover in the video, but plants also have kind of like an immune system. It's not like our human immune system, but they're plants can defend themselves from crops. One of the cool things that oregano does and some of these other plant species do is they actually activate plants' immune systems, so it makes them hardier against crops in the first place, or against pests in the first place. So yeah, love that company. So this is— I have a lot of other examples I want to share, but I know we just threw a lot of information at you, and I want to get to some questions, but I wanted to end with this quote from Andreesen Horowitz. And this was in their Bio Eats World manifesto that came out about, I think, almost exactly a year ago. So it's that today, bio today is where information technology was 50 years ago, on the precipice of touching all of our lives. I think when they wrote this manifesto, they were specifically talking about biotech, about CRISPR engineering, DNA, and about pharmaceuticals. And they're right. We have the ability to do things with biology that we've never been able to do before. I think what I want to leave you with and challenge you all with is we also have the tools and technology to understand how nature functions and works at really a basic level. A lot of what we're seeing in biomimicry are things that work at a nanoscale. We have super slippery surfaces. That actually have ridges and bumps because of what we're learning from nature. Smooth surfaces, again, don't really exist. So how can we learn to make more aerodynamic planes or ship hulls based on things that we observe in nature? I think I also just want to mention that nature exists in ecosystems. It's systemic. There's systems that come into play. That's an area that we're also exploring, and we see a great example of that in a lot of wastewater treatment facilities. You know, we have typically our sewage plants collect all the water, they process it, and more and more we're learning that wetlands also play an important role. So how might we be able to work with wetlands? How might we be able to work with a living ecosystem to treat our wastewater? We have a lot to learn from nature. And we believe that by doing it and by learning, truly learning from nature, by practicing biomimicry, we're going to create a healthier, more sustainable world. So I'm going to stop my screen here, and then Dustin, I would love to come back and—

Yeah.

Perfect.

Okay. Yeah, we can come back to the slide deck later if we want to talk about some more of those examples, but really awesome presentation and primer on biomimicry. Biomimicry. And yeah, just super interesting. I think the case studies really make it clear, like, what this is conceptually, because it can seem a little bit of a big topic, I guess, for people. I want to ask you first about, you know, it's kind of a personal— well, I'm not— I guess not a personal question, but what are some of the areas that you're most excited about today personally for innovation or things that you believe can be positively disrupted by biomimicry?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think I'm being— so as we talk about climate change and climate solutions, a lot of what we're talking about is how do we sequester carbon? How do we get carbon neutral by buying carbon offsets, things like that? I think I'm really interested in— maybe the question is, how do we redesign our world so we don't produce that amount of waste in the first place? For example, most of the synthetic clothing you wear, like a lot of the wicking sports gear or whatnot, nylon, is made from oil. That's petroleum-based. And no one kind of looks at oil and says, oh, that's going to make a good dress, or that's going to make a beautiful shirt, right? So how might we learn from how nature protects things? Polar bears have extremely high-quality kind of thermal insulation based on their hair. How might we learn from that to create a coat or a jacket that can protect us from the cold? How might we learn from how species produce color to make clothing that doesn't have to be dyed and kind of the harmful dyeing process, which is one of the biggest causes of water pollution?

Yeah, yeah, I love that answer because I feel like as people talk about moving towards a green economy, most of the attention is all on fuels to heat homes and fuels to transport vehicles. But obviously, yeah, synthetic petroleum-based products are in so many other things. And so just reimagining like how to look at clothing without some of those synthetic inputs. Yeah, really, really interesting.

Love that.

Next question I have here from the audience, somebody asked about joining the biomimicry network, you know, if somebody is a professional and they want to join a mentor network, is there a place to kind of reach out to work with biomimicry?

Oh, cool. Thanks for asking. Um, yeah, a couple different options. So if you want to participate in any of the design challenges, those are open. We also are always looking for mentors and coaches, especially for that youth design challenge for the K through 12. We're always looking for people who want to volunteer and work with some younger learners there. I think there's also some really great opportunities to learn more about biomimicry. So there's a course that we run in partnership with Biomimicry South Africa called Learn Biomimicry. So if you just go to learnbiomimicry.com, you can kind of take a deep dive into a lot of what we're talking about here. And then I think last but not least, you know, as we're working with these startups, especially some of these startups that are already selling product and already have received investment, We're always looking for other investors, especially impact investors and corporates who might be interested in meeting these teams, because our goal is to get these solutions out there into the world.

Awesome, perfect. Yeah, that question actually came from Bandana, who I know she has worked with some of the Thought for Food teams for the past challenge. So I think she's coming from some experience with mentoring startups. Well, I have a question about, you know, and I feel like I kind of know the answer, but is biomimicry really just for hardware products? Or is there any applicability to any software engineers who are on the call?

That's a fantastic question. I certainly think that most of the biomimicry solutions we see are hardware-based. A lot of them are deep tech academic spinouts. But there certainly are software applications. One company that's in Australia, RedGrid, They are making a smart energy grid based off of kind of principles that you see hive-based insects follow. So like honeybees and ants, you know, individually, like an individual ant is really dumb and can't make decisions for itself. But when you have a hive, you know, all of a sudden it becomes this kind of superorganism. And what we're realizing are that each ant or each honeybee might have 3 3 specific kind of questions. That's not the right word, but 3 specific things they're looking for. And based on those 3 decision points, they come back and share that with the rest of the hive. And based then on all of these different decision points coming together, so now all of a sudden you have all of these data points, you can— the hive can collectively make a joint decision. So I think we see a lot of that kind of in swarm intelligence. I would also just mention that I think we also see some really interesting applications on— I guess this is hardware again. I was going to say hardware that's allowing for some software solutions. Like if we want to have driverless cars, we need LiDAR and radar sensors. So how do we produce those in a way that maybe can mimic like an owl's eyeball that can see things really sharply at night, or how do we make sure we keep that surface clean? So I think oftentimes biomimicry is an enabling technology, and it can also be a platform technology as well.

Yeah, perfect, perfect. Yeah, I wanna kind of ask, you know, for non-biologists or non-scientists, you know, for those who are just new to biomimicry, you mentioned asknature.org, which has, yeah, I've been on there and I know there's tons of like ideas and resources resources. What are some other best practices out there for non-specialists to research potential biomimicry solutions to product design challenges?

It's a great question. You definitely don't have to be a scientist. I think, you know, one thing we are seeing is that a lot of our teams eventually have a PhD on their team, but it oftentimes doesn't have to start that way. So I want to actually share an example, and this kind of gets back to the fashion one too. So I'm going to share my screen again here, Dustin.

Perfect.

So give me a second to pull this one up. Great. So we just talked about textiles, and people don't realize the enormous climate impact our clothes has on the planet. It's the cause of 20% of our wastewater worldwide. This is a real picture of effluent coming out of a textile plant, I think in Bangladesh. So this team of fashion designers and textile designers, they weren't scientists, they're students studying textile design and textiles in school. They asked this really amazing question of, you know, how does nature get their— how does nature get this brilliant color? And they were specifically intrigued by the Discosoma coral shown here. They kind of went beyond, they didn't just say, I want to replicate that color, I want to make that same color. They were really asking this fundamental question of how does the coral produce that color. And for this Discosoma coral, it's actually produced as a protein. It's called red fluorescent protein, and it's used as a biomarker already in science, but so, so it's very well studied. But these textile designers, again not scientists, realized that it was this protein. And knowing it was this protein, and knowing that there were advances in biotechnology, They were able to synthesize, grow essentially E. coli bacteria that produced this protein and synthesize them into textile fibers. So here's a great example of this team came up with the idea, learned some of the science to make a proof of concept, and then joined up with a leading scientist who really understands kind of this textile market. And that's how they got their start. I'll just mention, I think a lot of our design challenge participants are also not scientists. A lot of them are engineers and industrial designers. And what we see oftentimes there are things— they're looking at more structural things. So think about a basking shark or a manta ray. They have their— they're a filter feeder. They just swim through the water with their mouth open all the time. So how do they capture their particles? They actually have these, what they're called gill rakers, that kind of cause little vortexes in the water that shoot the particles of food into their stomach. So that right there, if you can understand, if you can first find out about that, which is part of the goal of AskNature, and then understand kind of from an engineering perspective how that works, you can create an engineering design that might mimic that same sort of filtration technique.

Perfect. Perfect. I love this example. It relates to one of the audience questions that I guess I want to ask next, because you mentioned that these, you know, these were basically fashion students. And Ellie asks, and feel free to rehash any of the kind of programs you've already kind of mentioned, but so Ellie asks, you know, what can college students do to get more in touch with biomimicry?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think the starting place is check out the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. And we have a lot of resources there. We have what we call the Biomimicry Toolbox and just a bunch of other resources that will help you go through this design process. And it incorporates a lot of things you might find in a human-centered design process as well. I'm going to stop sharing my screen so you can see me again. So I think that's a starting place. I think the other thing I'd recommend is You know, as a college student, take a biology class. Like I studied mechanical engineering and I had an intro to biology. Um, but I would, I would encourage you to, like, I think part of what makes biomimicry so interesting and fascinating is that it's really multidisciplinary. Like for so long we've separated, like our human-built world is different than our natural world. And I think biologists and naturalists thought the same thing. Our natural world is different than our human-built world. But what we're finding is it's a continuum. As we build, as humans build things, that affects the natural world. As the natural world, you know, kind of goes through all of its processes of hurricanes and everything like that, affects our built world. So I also see this being multidisciplinary. So I think I'd recommend checking out the design challenge, check out ask nature and then explore some of these areas a little bit more.

Perfect. I love the way you mentioned siloing and sometimes you hear in academia, the ivory tower or whatever, where different areas of expertise are siloed from one another. Do you think that there is an innovation to commercialization gap or a clog in terms of basic research making its way into products that are actually on the market? If so, any thoughts about fixing that or minimizing that gap in any way?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm going to share my screen again and share another example here. Here we go. This is a mantis shrimp. I'm sharing this in response to your question, Dustin, because scientists have been studying the mantis shrimp for for years. And for this particular case study, I think scientists were looking at the mantis shrimp's club for 10 years. And what they were looking at, what these researchers were looking at was the shrimp can punch at a speed faster than a.22 caliber bullet. So like it punches extremely fast and it punches shells, like it punches really hard things to break them open, yet its club never breaks. So like you would think based on laws of physics, its club would break eventually. So these scientists were fascinated by this. What they discovered was that this club has this helical kind of architecture. So it's made out of chitin, which is the same thing that, um, the rest of its body is made out of, but it's layered in a way that's kind of offset by about 15 degrees, which actually dissipates energy. Right. So again, it took scientists like 10 years to dig in and really start to understand this. And it took until the founder of Helicoid Industries saw this technology sitting in the technology transfer office, and with his background in composite materials said, oh my goodness, we can bring this into carbon fiber, we can bring this into the composite market. So now that they've licensed this technology from the university and they're testing this on planes, can they make lighter weight planes? That are stronger and more durable, which will obviously save fuel costs. Their models have shown, and they're just starting to do the testing, that they could potentially double the length of a wind turbine blade by including this. And for those that know energy, doubling the length of a wind turbine blade, that would quadruple the energy output. But yeah, I think this is an example, Dustin, of like We're so— like, I'm so thankful that the founder came along and found this technology in the tech transfer office. Otherwise, we wouldn't have this advancement. And I think part of where I'm looking is, where are some of the labs that we know are starting to spin out more companies? So we're trying to plug in there. But I would also encourage all of you, if you're university affiliated, like, have a talk with your tech transfer office. Oftentimes in biology and chemistry, they're mainly targeting pharmaceutical companies, and they're not thinking about, um, about some of the other applications. So I think, I think there's a lot, lot there.

Absolutely. I, I love that advice for individuals to like, you know, whatever your local research university is, kind of reach out to the tech transfer office if there is one. And I know at Foundry Institute, you know, as kind of players in the startup ecosystem, we are looking to partner with different Tech Transfer Offices for exactly the same reason, because we know that there's like innovation that's kind of there that's sort of looking for a route to commercialization. And so I think if you're an early-stage entrepreneur or just looking for your next thing, like, yeah, that's some really great advice. I love that. I want to ask an audience question from Nikita. It seems kind of, yeah, really, it's a straight question. So, you know, how do you go about sharing and designing an idea without patent issues? Have you heard of companies that are struggling with patents or or IP in the process of designing a new idea? And if so, kind of any advice for IP?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm not an IP lawyer, so I just need to preface that up front. So I'll also preface that as soon as you get into DNA and kind of altering DNA, that is a whole other kind of intellectual property conversation to have. So I'll go back to that example of Helicoid Industries. They can't patent the mantis shrimp. Like, you can't have a patent on an animal or what exists in that animal or kind of a function that that animal, you know, produces or does. But you can patent the application to our built environment. So that's where I think that there's the difference. And that's where, why we see a lot of biomimicry solutions are coming originally from academic research papers. And then people learn from that and are able to create a, you know, start getting intellectual property based on the human kind of built environment design. So in Helicoid's use case, they have the patent on the composite manufacturing process of the layering of the composites. It is a, I think it's a discussion point. I mean, as an organization, it's something we talk about a lot. We're learning from nature and we're learning from organisms and ecosystems, do we have an ethical— like, should there be an ethical responsibility to financially supporting those ecosystems and financially supporting those aspects of what we're learning from? So yeah, it's a conversation that I think is worthwhile to have. And there's a lot to explore there.

Yeah. And maybe if the application, unlike this case, like if you're taking something, I guess, from basic research and you're working again with like a technology transfer office, they might be licensing the intellectual property to you. But yeah, it's a, yeah, that's definitely, it's a whole rabbit hole in and of itself, intellectual property, but you know, there are definitely protections to go about. Yeah, any kind of case that you're going after.

Yeah, there's a couple, just real quick to that point, I would also say because most of what, a lot of what I'm presenting again, they're platform technologies, it's not gonna be used by just one industry, it can be used across, a range of industries, we oftentimes see kind of exclusive licensing deals. So there's an example, um, I don't have a slide for this one, but, um, adhesives, so like glue adhesives, are really toxic usually, and they also don't really work well in wet, moist environments. Um, when we look to see like how mussels, for example, cling to rocks underwater, there's some really interesting mechanisms that happen there. And one of the kind of, one of the innovations we're seeing in this space was actually funded by the dental industry. So that the dental company that funded this research into mollusks and how they attach to water, they own the intellectual property for dental applications. But the company and the researchers who are now spinning out a new startup have a license for every industry other than dental. So I just wanted to mention that, yeah, once you get into tech transfer, there's a lot of interesting use cases. I'm not an expert by any means there, but yeah, it's worthwhile to explore if it's something you're interested in.

Perfect. We have a couple of audience questions that are like very specific, so, you know, you can feel free to take it or leave it. If you can't speak to it, that's fine. Tío asked Has anybody cultivated a microalgae to convert waste into biofuel to clean ocean waste? Are you aware of any examples related to that?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think so. When we approach kind of specific human design problems, one of the things we want to ask is, what we like to say, like, how do you biologize that problem? So to biologize that, if we were to go through the ask nature kind of framework, you might ask, how might we transport material? Because you're trying to get rid of waste, and then you can kind of go down and you can start to filter through. And I have seen some applications, especially around kind of capturing rainwater runoff from agricultural fields that incorporate algae into their systems to treat that kind of at the point source. I don't know of any that's working kind of actually in the ocean on an ocean level. And I think, again, my question would be— is how biologizing that question— is how might we transport material? How might we get rid of that material? Or how might we convert that into something benign? And look to see the pathways that exist in nature that That happens.

Deepak has been engaging in the chat a lot. He has given a one-line pitch, so I'll kind of just read it and you can make of it what you will. So there's no editing here, or not much. He says, "We're designing an AI-led IoT cryptocurrency which incentivizes biomimicry or using organic computation for ecological complexity/biodefense scoring." That's kind of a mouthful. I'm honestly not sure, but he asked, you know, can you offer feedback on his one-line pitch concept or, you know, how he could build upon it and move forward with it with the Biomimicry Institute?

Cool. Well, yeah, thanks. Thanks for sharing. And I would certainly be intrigued to learn a little more. I'll put on like my startup coaching hat here. So stepping a little bit away from biomimicry and more in this role of supporting startups, I think, I think one thing that I might just advise from the one sentence pitch is to watch out for buzzwords and figure out how you can communicate without using jargon. So I don't know anything really about AI or quantum. I'm also not a crypto person. So I can't quite understand what you're working on. So I think my startup coaching advice there would be for all of you is how can you communicate what you're doing in terms that maybe like a high schooler, elementary school student would understand?

Yeah. I think that's great feedback. Yeah. We saw, I syndicated an article like a couple of months ago that was about your, if you can pitch it to your grandma and grandma can understand it, then it's really getting there. So yeah.

There's a book I recommend, and we have all of our startups read, called The Mom Test. Horrible name. It could be called something else, but the premise is kind of what Dustin said, is if you approach your mom or approach your grandmom with an idea, they're probably going to pat you on the back and say, oh, that's great. And then the conversation kind of dies. And you might look at that through the lens of they validated my idea, this must be good. But you didn't get any useful information there. So what you're going to want to do is how do you ask questions and learn from past behavior? And that's a big part of what I focus on with our startups, especially since we're bringing in something new that hasn't been seen in the world before. How can you get past history information? Like, oh, when was the last time you— that problem happened to you? What did you do when you faced that problem? Instead of pitching, oh, I have a new GPS solution, it's like, well, when was the last time that you got lost while you were on a hike? Great. Tell me about how you got out of that situation. It's a little subtle mindset shift, but I think it's important to remember as a young startup, the only answer for a future-facing question is, will you buy my solution? And the only answer you can get is if they actually buy it, if there's a transaction, or if they use it, if it's a— if you have users, not customers. So just wanted to throw that out there.

Yeah. This one's kind of more of a personal question. So, and you've already shared a lot of really cool examples, but you know, of all the different impact companies you've worked with, with Biomimicry Institute or TFF, or your, you know, roles at Penn State, what innovations have inspired you the most that you've kind of, you know, worked with the founders?

That's a great question. Man, I get so inspired by so many of these. I think technology-wise, Cypress Materials, the self-assembling paint, is just one of the most amazing technologies I've come across. And I think it has— it's game-changing. And I think one of the signs of why it's game-changing is they're making sales already. And they just incorporated not too long ago. Like, it's a company that that probably for growth at some point they're gonna need to raise funding, but they're already revenue generating. I have another example of a company that I think is fascinating. And this one I love because I just think, I think the founders are really great. I think they complement each other well. So let me share my screen. And this one actually came out of Penn State University coincidentally.

Aha, well, we have another question about Penn State that I'll ask you next then.

So yeah, perfect. Yeah, so, um, this came out of the Nature Inspired Engineering Lab at Penn State, and this is a pitcher plant. It's a carnivorous pitcher plant. When this pitcher plant is dry, ants can walk around that red ring. When it gets wet, they slip, they fall right in. So researchers wanted to know what caused that slippery mechanism, and what they found was that when it gets wet, it kind of gets— the ring gets infused with that liquid to cause this super slippery kind of surface area. So there's bumps and ridges that capture that liquid that just cause it to be almost, I mean, like slipping on a sheet of ice or something. So this company Spotless Materials, you can see an uncoated piece of ceramic on the left and a piece of coated ceramic on the right. And this is oatmeal that is supposed to represent poop. Human waste. So if you coat your toilet with this, this is how much more efficient and slippery this, you know, yeah, this is what will happen in the toilet. And this is interesting there, you know, they started this actually as part of the Gates Reinvent the Toilet project. But there's applications across so many industries. So think about, you know, the big cargo ships, the ship hulls, they're in the ocean for weeks at a time. And they get barnacles and things that grow on them. If you can have a super slippery surface where things can't attach, you're going to save an immense amount on fuel costs. Or same thing with, I mean, maybe something that's more close to home is like windshields. Like, how might this help repel rainwater from, from car windshields or plane windshields? And how does this allow us to transition to kind of the electric vehicle, self-driving car economy? So yeah, I think there's been a ton. I also love some of the lower-tech solutions. So there's a group I worked with as part of Thought for Food based out of Uganda. And there, in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, like up to 50% of the crops go to waste every year because there's no post-harvest solution. Like mangoes, these delicious mangoes will just rot because there's no way to preserve them. So they created this really simple, easy-to-use dehydrator that uses corn husks or coconut husks as heat to dry out the crops. So I think I get inspired by the deep tech and the teams, and then also some lower-tech solutions.

Perfect, perfect. Yeah, so this, just because it's also Penn State related, and this came out of a Penn State research lab, Connie asks you, she says, my chem PhD is from PSU, As a MechE student, did you ever come across any of the ag professors, or she says Professor Andrew Reed with the Huck Institute? So kind of a who you know at Penn State who's been interesting. I never actually even heard of the lab group that you said that came out of. That was— it is like very biomimicry aligned.

Yeah, Justin and I both went to Penn State together. It's where we met. Yeah, there's actually— Penn State has quite a number of biomimetic research coming out. There's actually a really interesting article about lightning bugs, an academic article where Penn State researchers were studying why lightning bugs' lights were so bright. Based on calculations, they shouldn't be that bright. This is where some of the biology goes over my head, but what they found was that they have kind of like slits in their abdomen that are asymmetrical, which causes different wavelengths of light to go out, which actually increases the intensity. So they're starting to apply that kind of slit design into LED lights to make them more efficient and make them more intense. So yeah, I think this happens across a range of disciplines, across a range of colleges.

So yeah, where are you— you've kind of spoken to this a little bit before, like the different kinds of teams, but where are you finding, you know, successful teams coming coming from? How do the teams get formed? Any thoughts or best practices around that?

Yeah, I think, so putting on kind of that investor startup scout hat, we work with quite a number of what I might say deep tech accelerators to source some of our teams. So one of my favorites, it's a great program, is called Activate. And they work specifically with scientist founders. Will give actually like a postdoc or PhD researcher a 2-year fellowship. So they pay for 2 years of their time to develop their research into a commercialized solution. So that's called Activate. Right now they have a hub in Berkeley and a hub at MIT. I think the other areas though, I'm glad there was some come ask about agriculture. I think we see a lot of solutions in the agriculture sector. I want to share one more example about ag here just to show So this, um, one second. So what you see on the screen here, this big picture, is a nematode. Nematodes are the most abundant living organism on the planet. There's more nematodes in like a cubic foot of soil than I think there are humans or something like that. It's incredible. And nematodes can either be parasitic or they can be beneficial. When they're parasitic, they attack plants, roots, crop roots. When they're beneficial, they'll attack pest organisms like moths or caterpillars. These nematodes communicate via chemical pheromones. So they release chemical signals saying, hey, I found food over here, or hey, the food source is depleted over here, which will then disperse or attract nematodes. So the company Pharaonim, The founders have been studying nematodes for 10+ years in an agricultural setting, realized they had this chemical communication system, and have now commercialized a synthetic pheromone they call Feronym that can either attract or repel nematodes. So to answer your question, I think while biomimicry happens across industry, I think we see it kind of popping up in specific categories like food and agriculture. We see that quite a bit. We see it quite a bit in the sanitation space. Nature is really great at disposing of waste. And then I think we see it on the material science kind of nano, nanotech side of things.

So perfect, perfect. Well, we're reaching the end here, so only kind of a few more questions to go. I guess I want to, I want to get to this audience question, so feel free to kind of get to it quick. So Jane asked, asks, can you share any firms you know, or if you know any, that are working on biomimicry related to architecture?

Yeah, there's actually quite a number. So there's a famous case study that is just slipping— the Westgate Building in Kenya, I believe, or in Tanzania. They were looking to create a more energy-efficient building. And they were looking at termite mounds and how termite mounds remain a constant 74 degrees all the time, and it's because of airflow. So that's a great example of a skyscraper that is based on biomimetic principles. And there's also a number of architecture studios that specifically are looking at biomimicry, and even more that are looking at biophilia and some other kind of nature-inspired design.

Very cool. So yeah, the solutions are out there. You know, a couple examples there, but definitely like it's possible to dive into that overlap between architecture and biomimicry. Really cool. I wanna ask you, I guess really quickly, is just final closing tips for entrepreneurs. Feel free to rehash any of the programs that you've talked about before, but for early stage or aspiring founders who are maybe new to biomimicry, just any kind of final thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think, You know, we have a lot to learn from the natural world. We— and if you think about it, like, humans have been learning from nature since the dawn of civilization, really. Like, that's how we've made all of our advances in food and medicine and agriculture. And even just until recently, like, da Vinci, one of the greatest inventors of all time, you know, he studied flying creature, he studied the human body and created inventions like the helicopter way before we could actually build the helicopter. It kind of seems like recently in the past 100, 200 years, we've stopped looking to nature and we've kind of trusted that humans are better at designing things and building things. And, you know, it's allowed for incredible advances. It's also now put us in this problem we have with the climate and with kind of environmental damages. So I think we're at a really unique time to be exploring any sort of biological solution, whether it's biomimicry or biotech or anything. I just think that where maybe computer science programming was in the '80s and '90s, I think we're at that point with biology now. If you can teach yourself CRISPR, go get a kit in the mail, you can do this at home. Learn how to bring biology and engineer biology. For me, I think that's what gets me excited and where I would recommend prospective entrepreneurs to look is how can we learn from and work with biology.

Perfect. Well, this has been so interesting. So many great examples, just a lot of really awesome insights that we're going to take away from this. So I just want to say thank you, Jared, for your time. Thank you to Biomimicry Institute. For joining us, making you available and joining us. And thanks to everybody else who's on the line here for joining today. Everybody will receive a copy of this webinar in their email in about 48 hours. So you can definitely reshare it out to people if anybody came to mind. So at any rate, Jared, thank you so much again for joining us today.

Yeah, thank you everyone.