Biomutualism, Breaking Down Silos, and Finding Inspiration

Developing a structure that encourages cross pollination of ideas is difficult at best. We are barely able to keep up with all the advances within a discipline, let alone take time to see what is happening in other fields. But as you may know from my love of ideas from strange places, I’m a big believer in breaking those silos down to drive innovative thought. In that vein I came across this Ted Talk from June by Robert Full called Learning from the gecko’s tail. His presentation demonstrates the powerful possibilities of cross discipline approaches to innovation. A few quotes really stood out: “[Biomutualism is] An association between biology and another discipline where each discipline reciprocally advances the other to where the collective advances that emerge are beyond any single field.” And: “We need to build biomutualisms like I showed that will increase the pace of basic discovery, in their … Continue reading