The Biomimicry Institute

Innovation - biomimicry launchpad and ray of hope prizein 2024, we supported another cohort of 20 multidisciplinary participants of scientists, innovators and designers from across the globe. This cohort engaged in a 10-week virtual program focused on storytelling, diversity, sustainability and entrepreneurial mindset including an in-person retreat to further establish this cohort of nature-inspired entrepreneurs. In addition, the program team attended the society of integrative and comparative biology (sicb), continued engagement with engineers for one planets advisory committee. 2024 also marked the evolution of the launchpad program into the innovation co-labs initiative to target a more established audience that may advance the organization's mission at an accelerated rate. The audience transitioned from early career individuals exploring nature-inspired entrepreneurship to established corporate leaders to activate industries with natures solutions through a 12-month collaboration, each year will invite a new cohort and will focus on a different sector. The ray of hope prize program identifies startups with nature-inspired solutions, amplifies their stories and connects them to mentors and investors. This is a hybrid program, with participants attending a nature retreat designed to create a life-long community of environmental entrepreneurs, followed by a 10-week virtual program focused on science communication and sustainable business practices. In prior years the program culminated with a $100,000 prize that helps companies cross a critical threshold in becoming viable businesses. In supporting the next generation of businesses to solve big challenges, the institute brings attention to the innovative, nature-based solutions needed to build a sustainable and resilient world. In 2024, we evolved the program from a 10-week virtual startup support program with an associated prize, to a 6-month accelerator with a similar structure and format to the original program. Changes included the transition of the $150k in grant prizes rather than being distributed to a winner and runner-up; these funds were distributed equally among the 10 startups selected in the 2024 cohort. The majority of the program content remains virtual, the extended program enabled us to include a focused 6 week impact sprint where startups worked with subject matter experts across a range of topics with 4 startups working closely with external partners prime coalition and their crane tool to measure their projected future ghg emissions. The in-person nature retreat also pivoted to new york to align with new york climate week to provide a global stage for the 2024 cohort of startups to present their nature-inspired innovation to a room of aligned investors, corporate partners and the wider biomimicry community. The retreat itself took place in the catskills and focused on founder well-being, nature reconnection and building a supportive cohort of peers.

Asknature - asknature and asknature hiveas the largest open-access database for innovators to find biological models for design guidance, asknature is mission-critical for our work. Students use asknature when they first learn design and engineering skills in various biomimicry programs and continue to use it as they advance through university and become innovators. Our aim is to have nature-inspired design become standard practice, with asknature as a primary tool.we currently have more than 1,775 articles describing biological strategies (a characteristic, mechanism, or process that performs a function for an organism or other type of living system), 310 describing innovations (stories behind realized and conceptual products, services, and system components that are inspired by biology), 75 indexed resources specifically designed for educators, and 40 feature pages featuring curated subsets of our content and contextualizing intros or essays. Asknature is the world's go-to and largest open-access source of biomimicry education resources for primary, secondary, post-secondary, and professional audiences. In 2024 we improved functionality and added or updated dozens of pages of content to this service.in 2024, we had approximately 636,000 engaged users on the site who accessed free resources and content (in 2023 we reported 712,000 total visitors, but changes in google analytics led to the new description and a lower number this year). Overall they generated 3.2m views. Our users come from a wide variety of sectors including education, architecture, design, engineering, biotechnology, environment, land use, health, transportation, energy, fashion, government, non-profits, and media.the us is our largest audience, but 75% of our traffic is international, coming from 229 countries. This is up from 63% in 2023, and we believe it is driven by the soft-launch of ai generated translations of all our pages into multiple languages, namely spanish, french, german, and portuguese. We hope to work out some technical issues around the way the translator works with our search functionality, and then to promote the translation option more prominently.to increase our ability to create new pages quickly and efficiently, we continued developing and using ai tools to aid in the translation of information from scientific papers into accessible asknature pages. We also continued development of a public-facing ai tool that will allow users to enter their questions in a chat-style interface and receive scientifically accurate information in easy-to-understand language, framed within asknature's editorial and ethical guidelines, and contextualized for each user's particular challenges and area of activity.we also continued producing content specifically for instagram, translating biological strategies into blueprint-like overlays on top of beautiful nature photos. We produced 29 of these images, generating thousands of new likes and receiving roughly double the average number of likes per post for our account. This was fewer images than in 2023 because of diversion of resources towards launching our asknature hive online community platform.we continued to produce our monthly newsletter through most of the year, but then sunset it as we launched the asknature hive online community platform and began to communicate with our followers that way. We also continued writing and recording 24 roughly 1-minute audio stories about biological strategies in nature for the wonderspace podcast from the panahpur foundation. In the second half of the year we began in earnest the creation of the asknature hive online community platform. This is part of our new ten-year strategy, and groundwork that will support other future efforts including an online learning platform and offline convenings.we chose to build the hive on the kajabi platform because of its low cost and robust learning module options. We launched with a series of monthly live conversations with prominent figures in the biomimicry space including our co-founder janine benyus, and green chemistry pioneer john warner.we decided to offer membership at a rate of $10/month or $100/year, with various discounts offered at different times and to different audiences. After the launch of the platform, we hired a new staff member to lead the ongoing audience building and community management.

Education and outreachthe biomimicry youth design challenge (ydc) provides a framework for middle and high school students to learn stem and environmental science using biomimicry and a project-based experience. The biomimicry institute implemented the sixth ydc program this year, with a total of 353 people registering to the ydc website. Around 65% of registrants planned a design project with their students, 11% planned to use the resources in other ways, and the remaining 24% were interested only in viewing the resources for future use. Registered users represented 52 different countries; users residing in the united states came from 47 different states.teams of 82 coaches and 584 students successfully submitted 177 projects to the ydc competition (81 in the high school track and 96 in the middle school track), representing a 42% increase from the prior year's 125 submissions. Findings from the evaluation presented in this report indicate the program had a positive impact on students and coaches' knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Coaches' confidence in their ability to guide students through the design challenge experience increased from 83% at pretest to 96% at post test. Coaches' confidence in their ability to introduce biomimicry to their students increased from 87% to 96% at posttest, and their ability to understand the biomimicry design process remained almost the same, from 82% to 83%.the areas in which students were most likely to report being impacted by the program (as measured by the percentage of students reporting a "moderate" to "strong impact") were: understanding of biomimicry (90%), knowing how to solve problems (85%), and thinking critically (84%). Areas that coaches were most likely to report that the program impacted students were: students' understanding of biomimicry (100%), ability to identify design problems (98%), learning and using scientific information (98%), collaboration skills (98%), and student engagement (93%).