Business as second nature: Biomimicry offers a framework to shift from replication to innovation using natural principles

More than a century after Antoni Gaudi first put pencil to paper, Sagrada Familia crossed the finish line earlier this year. Now piercing the Barcelona skyline at a towering 172.5 m, it's officially the world's tallest church. On June 10, Pope Leo XIV will host a special mass marking the 100th anniversary of the great Catalan architect's passing.

Gaudi's masterpiece is considered an architectural marvel by most. Others, like George Orwell, called it 'one of the most hideous buildings in the world', and remarked that the anarchists showed bad taste for not blowing it up during the Spanish Civil War.

Yet, what makes the basilica truly extraordinary often goes unnoticed. Gaze at it closely: the building does not merely imitate nature aesthetically - it behaves like it. Its bone-like columns branch and twist as they rise, distributing weight exactly as trees do. Gaudi didn't just decorate with nature, he borrowed its structural intelligence.


This Environment Day offers another reason to reflect on Sagrada and what it embodies: a striking example of biomimicry in architecture. Rather than imposing human design onto nature, this approach - popularised in the late 1990s by science writer Janine Benyus - invites us to align with principles perfected through 3.8 bn yrs of planetary R&D.

Biomimicry is often seen in product design:

Kingfisher & Bullet Train: Early Japanese Shinkansen trains created deafening sonic booms in tunnels. By studying kingfishers - which dive into water with minimal splash - engineers reshaped the train's nose. The result? A quieter ride and 15% less energy use.

Shark & Superbug: For decades, hospitals used harsh chemicals to kill bacteria. Then, scientists looked at sharks. Despite moving through dirty water, sharks stay clean. Their secret isn't a chemical but geometry. Their skin has microscopic ridges called denticles, arranged in a pattern too small for bacteria to colonise. Today, companies like Sharklet produce films with this texture to repel superbugs without chemicals.

Yet, biomimicry is more than a design tool. It offers a framework for rethinking how systems evolve, products are engineered, and nations shift from replication to innovation rooted in natural principles. It can also function as an OS for corporate and social enterprises, enabling a move from rigid, resource-heavy hierarchies toward lean, self-correcting ecosystems.

The Habitats Trust (THT) is a telling example. Co-founded in 2018 by Roshni Nadar Malhotra, chairperson of HCLTech, and Shikhar Malhotra, CEO and vice-chairman of HCL Healthcare, the trust focuses on overlooked ecosystems across India. Couple of years ago, its director, Rushikesh Chavan, asked a question: was THT becoming resilient, or simply busier?

Chavan brought in Anjan Prakash of The Butterfly Effect to apply a biomimicry lens to the organisation's setup, functioning and goals. Prakash encouraged the trust's employees to see their setup as a natural ecosystem. Projects were reassessed not by ambition alone but also by what could be sustained. Focus shifted from expansion to depth, and from proliferation to stewardship. Employees came to understand that nature does not reward endless acceleration, but balance and diversity.

India's economy stands at a pivotal moment. While we have climbed up the Global Innovation Index (GII) - from 81st in 2015 to 39th in 2024 - we face a middle-innovation trap. The ambition is to reach a $30 tn developed economy by 2047 by moving up the value chain - designing rather than assembling, inventing rather than replicating. However, our prevailing mindset remains industrial and risk-averse.

Prashant Dhawan of Biomimicry India focuses on how biomimicry offers the structural shift we need to break into the innovation game. In nature, variation is the engine of adaptation, and intelligence is distributed rather than centralised. If Indian industry adopts even a fraction of this logic, it could unlock a new innovation streak.

To move forward, three core transitions are critical:

Extraction to alignment: Instead of treating natural resources as inputs to be maximised, industries could design processes that mirror circular ecological flows.

      Scale-at-all-costs to resilience: Growth strategies could prioritise durability and interdependence over sheer expansion.

Siloed research to biological enquiry: Corporates could begin by asking the complicated questions of our time - How does nature regulate heat? Eliminate waste? Optimise structures with minimal material? - and partner with scientific institutions to translate those insights into market solutions.

Globally, companies such as Southwest Airlines, FedEx and Unilever use superorganism-inspired algorithms - specifically swarm intelligence mimicking ant colonies - to evolve their logistics, route planning and freight transfer processes. But in India, biomimicry is niche. The barrier is not intellectual but psychological.

While senior leadership in Indian corporates are often keen, acceptance remains weak further down the spine. This is probably because going down the biomimicry path requires abandoning the 'mechanistic' world view of the industrial age and accepting that the economy is nested within ecology, not the other way around.

India has a chance to flip the switch. It can either continue to treat nature as a resource to be managed. Or it can finally recognise nature as the world's most advanced laboratory. R&D is done, prototypes are proven and the manual is open. Are we prepared to use it - not as metaphor but as method?