transforming business to disrupt. regeneratively.
using
Nature’s
design thinking playbook
for bio-circular disruptors
ADAPT . TRANSFORM . DISRUPT .
We specialise in helping exec teams and entrepreneurs, transitioning to the bio circular economy, through the process of business model innovation. Using Nature’s design thinking playbook - biomimicry x living systems x relationality.
we believe strategy connected to the science of life unlocks unparalleled growth opportunity. We believe innovation that leverages Nature’s 3.8 billion years of R&D is the key. We believe the blueprint for market leadership lies with living intelligence. We’re out to showcase what’s possible.
life is rich.
welcome to the
bright side
not human centered design, but life centered design. not artificial intelligence, but living intelligence.
Where Nature is not merely a TNFD or SBTN governance exercise, biodiversity offset or tree planting project. Instead, where Nature is a strategic design thinking partner for business innovation and growth. high performance. high efficiency. high tech. high scalability. high growth potential. The risk only sits on the balance sheets and P&Ls of 20th century business models too slow to change.
bespoke 1-2-1
TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANCY
In house, one to one programs and bespoke strategic services for businesses transforming for the circular bio economy. Including diagnostic assessment, strategic review, business model re/design and transformation journey.
for disruptive exec and board teams
REGENERATIVE CLIENTS ONLY
OUR SERVICES
capability building
TRANSFORMATIONAL CAPABILITIES
Short nano courses to build your BQ™ design thinking skills. Biomimicry, Living systems thinking, Resilience, Complex adaptive disruption, Dynamic Capabilities. Symbiotic collaboration.
for disruptive design thinkers
REGENERATIVE CLIENTS ONLY
bio.t Disrupt MBA
BUSINESS MODEL TRANSFORMATION
Our signature course. A BMI business model re/design journey specific for bio-circular disruption. You are taken step by step through the process of discovery, sense-making and design of your disruptive future business blueprint.
for disruptive entrepreneurs
REGENERATIVE STARTUPS ONLY
TRANSFORMATION DIAGNOSTICS
We offer diagnostic services so you can assess your disruptive potential, and benchmark your BMI transformational journey. Using Nature’s evolutionary measures of performance, efficiency, growth scalability and system optimisation. If you’re not sure, this is a good place to start.
the 3 problems
we solve
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Most organizations are playing a Nature game driven by TNFD and SBTN governance disclosures. Focused on their footprint and emissions, with a compliance cost mindset. But this misses the point.
The ‘natural capital’ bubble is 3x LARGER than the CO2 bubble (Stuchtey et al 2016). If you haven’t connected your business model and strategy to the science of life, then the disruptive impact on your balance sheets and P&Ls is big.
But the BIGGER RISK is you miss seeing the opportunity. The emerging circular bioeconomy is estimated to be worth US$7.6 trillion, with growth of 11.7% (1) and worth US$30 trillion by 2050 (2), a third of global GDP, while positively impacting 9 different Sustainable Development Goals (3).
The European Union’s circular bioeconomy is already US$2.3 trillion, supporting 17 million jobs (4). Other countries, like Aotearoa, New Zealand, with 80% of trade exports reliant on land-based products (5) are only nascent in the transition.
The speed with which businesses adapt and transition to the circular bioeconomy and realise the significant twofold benefits of economic growth and risk resilience, will redefine the playing field for markets and global geopolitics.
It’s a decision of not if, but when.
—-
1.HTF Market Intelligence. October 2025. Global circular bioeconomy projects market – global outlook 2020-2033. https://www.htfmarketinsights.com/report/4383907-circular-bioeconomy-projects-market
2.Nature Finance. 2024. The Global Bioeconomy. https://www.naturefinance.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ENG-TheGlobalBioeconomy_FINAL.pdf
3.Taron, A. and Gebrezgabher, S., 2024. Circular bioeconomy: A pathway to sustainable development in an age of global crisis. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-586-620241007
4.European Commission. 2024. The sustainable and circular bioeconomy in the EU. https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/S2d_2_The%20sustainable%20and%20circular%20bioeconomy%20in%20the%20EU.pdf .
5.Scion, the New Zealand Bioeconomy Science Institute, 2025. Growing New Zealand’s bioeconomy. https://www.scionresearch.com/about-us/the-forest-industry-and-bioeconomy/the-circular-bioeconomy#:~:text=A%20just%20transition:%20Moving%20from,Stora%20Enso
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Business model innovation (BMI), the process of transforming or redesigning a business model is a compounding problem for bio-circular futures; it sits on top of an existing BMI problem. When it comes to transforming any kind of business model, there are a few big elephants in the room:
ELEPHANT #1 - BMI SUCCESS RATES
70% of business transformations fail to improve performance over time (McKinsey & Co 2021).
88% of transformation innovations fail at achieving their original goal (Bains & Co 2024).
97% of business leaders are not ready to deliver strategic innovation (Boston Consulting Group 2024).
What’s more, those businesses that do succeed, still leave 1/3 of their potential value untapped (McKinsey & Co 2022).
ELEPHANT #2 - BMI CAPABILITIES
Behind these statistics sits a lack of critical thinking capabilities:
McKinsey & Co (2022) identify the #1 root cause as a lack of fact-based clarity when defining strategic goals and purpose (1). In other words, value gets lost in the thinking.
Bains & Co (2024) identify the #1 root cause as a lack of dedicated people with strategic thinking capabilities (2).
World Economic Forum (2025) identify the #1 barrier to business transformation as a leadership skills gap in resilience, adaptive agility, and complex systems thinking (3).
ELEPHANT #3 - BMI TOOLS
And behind these capability gaps sits a lack of thinking and practice tools. Research continues to reveal that, despite the many business model canvases that exist, it’s (i) the process of BMI that is the primary challenge in sensing and transforming value (Foss and Saebi 2017, Pieroni et al 2019), with (ii) a lack of contextual ecosystem framing (Zott et al 2024), and (iii) a gap in synthesizing the required capabilities needed to undertake a BMI process (Buruleaunu et al 2025).
In short, there’s a big gap. Plugging this gap is where we play.
We work with you in three, interdependent, ways:
Strategic transformation journey,
Capability building, and
Diagnostic measurement.
In this way, you’re guided step by step through the BMI process from contextual discovery and sense-making through to strategic decision making through to design of your strategy, innovations and business model. No matter where your starting point is.
We give you the thinking models, tech tools and practice steps. And we showcase what’s possible.
WHY WE LOVE THIS GAME
Because the rewards for you are in multiples - 1. Multiple new revenue streams, 2. Multiple new market creating, 3. Demand-led B2B and B2C growth, 4. Scalable growth, 5. De-risking, 6. Lower costs, 7. Capital flows, 8. More profit, and 9. At the highest order of sustainability.
Because it strengthens both your decision making (THINK) and executional performance (DO) - for your ongoing adaptive resilience
Because it applies to any business, across any sector, doing strategy or innovation (not just the biotech disruptors).
Because you don’t have to be a biologist, or even a design thinker, to do this. It only requires an entrepreneurial mindset.
And because frankly, it’s way more fun. It’s why we call it the bright side.
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How you think about value is at the core of BMI, design thinking, and dynamic capabilities. You can think of them like 3 circles in a Venn diagram:
Business model innovation is based on how well you create, deliver, and capture value
Dynamic capabilities are based on how well you sense, seize, and transform value
Design thinking is based on how well you discover and design value
All three, when done well, identify not just value, but value potential, and value risk.
The circular bioeconomy adds a topspin to value thinking, because it not only requires a reshaping of consumer behaviours, but a reshaping of incumbent value chains and market ecosystems as well.
This requires you to push past the definitional boundaries of value that make up the three value pillars of a business model (Bocken 2019). In practice, it add a whole new dimension to the BMI process:
To see the flow of value, and the value of flow across open networked systems (Bocken and Boons 2018).
To see and transform emergent potential value of biomass waste streams (Donner and de Vries 2021, Salvador et al 2021).
To trade, transact and broker new reciprocal value exchanges in symbiotic win : win relationships (Geissdoerfer, Bocken and Hultink 2016), and co-create emergent value (Bröring et al 2020), with new business models
To contribute and gift value that enhances the interdependent economic ecosystem as a whole.
This requires a way of thinking, an intelligence, that is (i) contextual, (ii) relational and (iii) transformational.
(this is the game changing point in how we play).
We look to Nature.
As beyond-human intelligence that’s not artificial, but evolutionary. With 3.8 billion years of living, adaptive, R&D intelligence. With hardcoded algorithms resilient enough to underwrite the very foundations of life.
Right now a rapidly emerging global movement of disruptors, strategists, futurists, innovators, researchers, and design thinkers are playing this bigger Nature game.
Cutting-edge businesses are re/designing anything from products, services and platforms to business models, value chains and operations - even ways of working as high performing teams.
They’re transforming themselves, building their adaptive resilience, and disrupting the shape of global markets, global industries, and the rules of the global economy.
WEF estimates biomimicry could create US$10 trillion in GDP growth and 395 million new jobs by 2030.
We think this undersells it. Research show there is a 88%+ innovation gap between how biology designs and how humans design (Vincent and Mann 2011).
Our own research shows Nature has evolved clear strategies to work dynamically across business model value axes, that can be cleanly and easily applied to business models, and the process of BMI. In the flow, exchange and transformation of value potential. In the creation, delivery and capture of value. In the sensing, seizing and leveraging of value.
What we particularly love is:
Nature’s design thinking doesn’t just play at the highest order of sustainability, it plays at the highest order of functionality. In factors of x10 ×100 ×1000. High performance. High efficiency. High tech. High scalability. High growth potential. Which makes for a way better business model blueprint outcome.
Nature’s playbook offers deep convergent patterns that can be simply abstracted as design principles to fast track the discovery, design, and decision making of BMI.
Nature’s design blueprints and archetypal working models have been tried, tested and proven to work, for a really long time. It’s not pushing into the impossible, it’s going deeper into what’s already been proven possible.
Nature’s playbook is hardwired for disruption, and to regenerate after disruption.
Whilst Nature’s playbook is biotechnical, design principles and archetypes can be abstracted to be used by anyone, in any industry, of any size, and in any leadership team.
We see ourselves only at the beginning of our disruptive evolutionary journey. Our bio.t METHOD gives you the levers to unlock yours.
Life is rich.
welcome to
living
intelligence
“Living intelligence will drive an exponential cycle of innovation; an accelerant for technologies. For some, this will unlock unprecedented opportunities. For others, it will trigger overwhelming disorientation. The gap between leaders and laggards will widen dramatically, not over decades, but months.” - Future Today Strategy Group
“While AI dominates headlines, biology is converging with exponential technologies to unlock unprecedented value. It will revolutionize every market in the next 5-10 years” - Singularity University
which game
are you playing?
-
Rhetoric is one thing. Business practice is another. Where are you playing, in reality? Where are your BMI frameworks taking you? Where is your strategic advice pushing you towards? The more you answer YES to the following prompts , the more likely you are holding back your potential - and carrying a ton of risk:
Your approach to INNOVATION orbits around "faster, better, cheaper, newer".
Your approach to STRATEGY gravitates to chasing unfair competitive advantage.
Your approach to ADAPTATION is a rinse and repeat of Agile.
Your approach to TRANSFORMATION is digitization (or restructuring lol).
Your conversation about DISRUPTIVE TECH FUTURES is stuck on large language tools.
Your approach to MARKET SIZING is TAM, SAM, SOM x PESTLE forces.
Your approach to NATURE is compliance disclosures, biodiversity credits, or TNFD tick boxes.
Your approach to LEVERAGE (if you’re honest) hinges off a clever blend of extraction, exploitation, data scraping, restricted access, price arbitrage, borrowing, or zero sum plays.
The #1 barrier that stops many people playing the bigger game is the ability to sense, seize, and scale value potential (called “dynamic capabilities”).
In the circular bio economy, value potential plays with a different playbook.
Is it time to update your design thinking practice?
