Biomimicry Circle #2 – Biomimicry in practice

Setting the stage, Máren Ingá Baer from Volvo Group framed the challenge clearly: the sustainability transition must happen dramatically faster, and traditional ways of solving problems are no longer enough. To meet increasingly complex industrial and societal challenges, organizations must become both faster and smarter in how they innovate. 

This is why Volvo Group is exploring biomimicry. 

Bringing together researchers, engineers, designers and innovators, the session explored how we can learn from that intelligence, and how new combinations of AI, visualization and immersive technologies can help translate nature’s wisdom into practical human solutions. 

Visualizing Complexity, Learning from Nature 

As Martin Högenberg opened the session, he reflected on how humanity is entering an era defined by both increasing complexity and exponential growth in data. To navigate that world, traditional ways of seeing are no longer enough. 

Visualization is evolving from static images and flat screens into immersive ways of understanding systems, relationships and complexity. This is closely connected to what Visual Arena describes as immersive intelligence, where AI, visualization and human spatial understanding combine to help us make better sense of increasingly complex worlds. 

Nature itself is immersive. In that sense, biomimicry is not only about copying nature’s forms, it is about learning from nature’s intelligence, and visualization is becoming one of the key bridges that makes this possible. 

Volvo’s Biomimicry Journey, From Biology to Patents 

A highlight of the session came from M’hammed Maya and Florence Breffort from Volvo Group, who shared how biomimicry is already shaping industrial innovation inside one of Sweden’s largest engineering organizations. 

Over a three-year journey, their teams developed methods for translating engineering challenges into biological questions: 

• What is the function we need to solve?
• How does nature solve similar problems?
• Which principles can be abstracted?
• How can those principles become engineering solutions? 

One example focused on autonomous mining trucks, where keeping sensors clean currently requires large amounts of washing liquid every day. 

By studying nature, the team discovered an important shift in perspective: engineering often focuses on active cleaning, while nature often focuses on preventing contamination in the first place. 

This led to inspiration from several biological mechanisms, including: 

• shark skin and fluid acceleration,
• beetle cleaning structures,
• protective eyelid mechanisms found in birds. 

Combining these principles resulted in new technical concepts and Volvo Group’s first biomimicry-linked patent. 

Florence Breffort also emphasized a crucial lesson for innovation teams: avoid rushing toward familiar solutions too early, and actively build teams with diverse perspectives, not only experts, but also people who ask unexpected questions. 

AI as a Translator Between Biology and Industry 

Another major insight came from Eliot Graeff, CEO of Asteria, who explored how AI can dramatically accelerate biomimicry. 

A key barrier has always been access to biological knowledge. Engineers are not biologists, and few organizations have the time or resources to build deep biological expertise internally. 

New AI systems are changing that. 

By mapping scientific knowledge into visual knowledge graphs and building AI agents trained to act as biological translators, organizations can increasingly search nature’s strategies in entirely new ways, turning biological intelligence into accessible design input. 

This is where AI, visualization and biomimicry converge. 

AI can search. 

Visualization can make complexity understandable. 

Human creativity can turn insight into action. 

Together, this creates a new capability, not simply digital intelligence, but immersive intelligence for innovation. 

Key Takeaway: Start with Real Challenges 

One clear insight from the room was that biomimicry feels both urgent and early. 

The opportunity is significant, but organizations still face familiar barriers: 

• limited time, 
• lack of biological knowledge, 
• siloed expertise, 
• and difficulty turning inspiration into implementation.  

Yet the momentum is growing. Conversations throughout the session reflected curiosity, openness and a shared belief that biomimicry can become a practical pathway toward smarter, more sustainable innovation. 

One idea stood out clearly. 

As Eliot Graeff noted, biomimicry offers something innovation often lacks: confidence. 

Nature is not based on theory alone, it is built on solutions tested and refined over 3.8 billion years of real-world iteration. What survives in nature has already proven its resilience, efficiency and adaptability. That gives innovators something rare: a model grounded not in assumption, but in evidence. 

The strongest recommendation from the session was simple: 

Start small, but start with a real challenge. 

Choose a problem worth solving. 
Explore how nature solves similar functions. 
Use visualization, AI and interdisciplinary collaboration to translate those principles into innovation. 

Because learning from nature is not only about finding better solutions, it is about building them with greater confidence.