LETTER OF INQUIRY TO THE LEMELSON FOUNDATION FOR INVITATION TO SUBMIT APPLICATION

 

Biomimicry is human-centered, naturally inspired, invention and innovation.

 

Biomimicry studies nature’s best ideas, then imitates its designs and processes to solve human problems, spurring life-conducive innovation and invention. Great Lakes Biomimicry (GLBio), a 501(C)(3) organization, creates conditions for innovation and invention by embedding biomimicry into our educational system, expanding STEM to STEAM – with awareness of equity and access especially for underrepresented populations – while helping businesses solve problems, using nature-inspired invention, and create new jobs.

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GLBio education programs seek to cultivate global citizens who see nature as a teacher and who have the confidence and imagination to reshape our world using biomimicry (life-conducive, nature-inspired invention).

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By tackling humanity's grand challenges, inventions tied to social good (e.g., water filtration inventions, disease prevention tools, prosthetics), GLBio partner schools and companies make invention and invention education through biomimicry relevant and optimistic. One goal of the approach is to extend interest in STEM and invention to otherwise disenfranchised students: young women and under-served minority learners.

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GLBio is building the world’s first integrated, crosscutting, early learning through post-secondary biomimicry education ecosystem. We are already having an impact on developing a talent pipeline of creative, inventive, critical thinkers and problem solvers. Educators recognize that biomimicry can enrich academic opportunities for all learners, naturally integrating resources – online invention-inspiration databases; videos; books; natural artifacts and found objects, and methods – science; engineering design-build processes; systems thinking; creative design; collaborative work; the lens of function; visual, spatial and mathematical reasoning. Educators gravitate to biomimicry because of its potential to make problem-based learning actually hands-on, authentic, exciting and relevant. Students, especially underrepresented populations, flock to the lens of bio-inspiration in invention as it brings creativity and design, plus the “Wow Factor” of organisms' structures and remarkable functions, and a sense of social relevance and empathy to heretofore bland STEM education programs.

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No other agency in the world operates like GLBio to create conditions for innovation and invention through biomimicry. Through our efforts, local schools and informal educational institutions offer multi- (or anti-) disciplinary biomimicry programs and education to constituents, but their work is done through our collaborations, partnerships and support, connecting education and economic development in a way that benefits the environment as biomimetic inventions are designed and built to hit that high, life-conducive, bar.

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GLBio’s Education Consortium engages interested educators in the biomimicry education ecosystem partnered with University of Akron PhD fellows, supporting teachers' cross-pollination of their biomimicry learning resources (e.g., their wind turbine blade re-invention with 3D models based on plant and animal structures). Further, GLBio’s Corporate Innovation Council is the only forum in the world that brings together corporations to discuss nature-inspired invention opportunities. GLBio, paying no one its first four years, garnering the investment of 35,000 volunteer hours from a dozen professionals, securing $500K of in-kind services, and with support from ten regional foundations, now needs to build capacity to train more teachers in nature-inspired invention, engage more students in biomimicry, and take its initiative to other parts of the globe!

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GLBio expects to position NEO as the world leader in the dynamic biomimicry market. The organization is already making an impact by bringing the concept of "what would nature do" to business R&D and, more importantly, to students. As children learn this concept at a young age, discovering, for instance, the way the electric torpedo ray and frog leg nerve responses inspired Alessandro Volta and generating their own battery-powered, nature-inspired inventions, they see the world through a new lens, in which nature is a mentor and expansive source of new ideas for their inventions. The field throws the invention inspiration-set wide open.

GLBio’s education system is designed to reflect these, and additional, design principles:

• Promote biomimicry for all learners, ensuring equity and access

• Support 21st Century STEM education that focuses on core principles, cross-cutting concepts and science/engineering practices, and which prepares learners to engage fluidly in the social sciences,

 

arts and humanities beyond disciplinary boundaries (as invention sits in a human context)

• Foster a sense of self-efficacy, imagination, and creativity in service to the world

 

Skilled nature-inspired inventors demonstrate shifts in mental models, and Habits of Thought, to, for instance:

• View nature as a teacher and source of divergent new ideas for inventions and innovation

• Consider whole systems rather than discrete components of systems

• Set the benchmark for human invention and innovation higher

• Produce life-conducive solutions to human challenges

• Value cross-disciplinary (or anti-disciplinary) thinking as a route to invention and innovation

• Feel confident in STEM, entrepreneurship and arenas of knowledge that are new to them

• Maintain awareness of and curiosity in the global environment in which they find themselves

• Have a sense of self-efficacy to be capable of assessing and revising the built environment

• Maintain persistence, grit and resilience

• Consider themselves fluid creators and able change-makers

 

As a tool for and a lens on invention, biomimicry expands opportunity. GLBio is seeking increased capacity to help power the organization through growth to a state of self-sustainability – especially in Pre-K-12 STEM biomimicry ed, both formal and informal – based on earned and philanthropic income. We believe the specific areas of invention education-related work below are particularly well suited for funding to achieve the above:

• Habits of Thought: our programs advance key skills and Habits of Thought – curiosity, creativity, environmental and community responsibility, systems thinking, design thinking, abstraction, problem-identification, function identification, extra-disciplinary communication, ideation, etc. – and support 21st-century STEM biomimicry education focused on science and engineering design-build practices

• Bio-Design Charrettes: GLB Bio-Design Charrettes leverage complex, real-world problem solving – bringing authenticity, excitement, deep learning, hands-on invention and innovation to the classroom

• Seed Bank: GLBio offers engaging Seed Bank materials to support learning: an introductory matching game pairs human inventions with their natural models; scavenger hunts send students into the field looking for function-supporting structures in nature; a game engages students to compare existing human invention and the functions of organisms to analyze critically deep patterns in emergent natural design to improve human inventions, and we hope to drastically expand our Seed Bank assets

• Myriad Formal & Informal Education Partner Programs: STEAM-based, biomimicry invention education partnerships have been established with hopes of evaluation and expansion to grow the ecosystem including: the Cleveland Metro Parks Zoo, Akron Zoo, Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM (TIES), Akron Public Schools, Cleveland Metropolitan School District, Lorain County Schools, the Cuyahoga County Public Library system, the Akron-Summit County Library system, Summit Metro Parks and the Conservancy of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Environmental Education Center

• Biomimicry Consortium: regional educators network via Consortium meetings and a Virtual Platform.

• GLBio Fellows: Univ. of Akron Integrated BioScience PhD fellows lead regional biomimicry education

• Wetland Adaptations Biomimicry: partnering with a university nature preserve, we provide outdoor STEAM Biomimicry for 800 middle and HS learners from under-served, inner city schools

• Biomimicry and the MetaGame Project: we are launching our Community of Practice with Carnegie Mellon ETC, NASA Glenn, VIBE, CLE Museum of Natural History, the EdGE at TERC Research, Project Ujima, Ohio Aerospace, a Valve Entertainment staffer, Great Lakes Science, and BRAIN to lead hands-on invention, research and evaluation creating analog and AR games teaching the Habits of Thought

• Biomimicry PD: educator development modules provide unique access to university laboratories, natural spaces and professionals advancing bio-inspired invention in classrooms and learning centers

• Stories: We are developing a bio-inspired invention cartoon and books (Scorpion meets Wild Kratts)

 

The lens of biomimicry, with its high benchmarks, its divergent and disruptive aspirations, is the tool of tomorrow’s inventors. We hope The Lemelson Foundation will assist GLBio to catalyze this accomplished community of practice, as the talent to tackle the complex problems of the world has been left latent too long.