bio.t BQ Capability nano courses
wanting to level up your design thinking?
We’ve decoupled the design thinking skills woven into our bio.t METHOD, to create our new bio.t BQ Capability nano courses. So you can build the capabilities you need for the disruptive, regenerative, biotech wave coming.
not human-centered design but life-centered design.
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You’re a thinker but don’t have the bandwidth to go deep. You might be an Exec people lead, a Board member or industry leader. You might be a management, design or sustainability consultant. You might be an educator. You might even be an investor.
You might be asking yourself, for you (or your team):
How do I strengthen my strategic thinking? How do I strengthen my disruptive practice? How do I keep abreast of the latest in disruptive design thinking?
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to get the inside track on disruptive regenerative biotech thinking?
to upskill in biomimicry design, living systems design or living ethics design thinking?
to tap into Nature’s strategic levers and design principles so you can lift your business performance, efficiency, scalability and resilience?
to access cutting-edge Biomimicry edge case studies?
to be handed a rigorous curation served up simply, so you don’t have to do any heavy lifting.
bio.t BQ nano course Living Systems thinking
Inhouse only. Public launch 2026.
Online live Zoom | 8 modules | 8 weeks
Our cornerstone course that introduces you to Nature’s living systems thinking. It helps build up your strategic sense-making (called ‘bio-dynamic capabilities’) for business disruption, strategic decision-making, and resilience building.
Each week in turn, we go through a different living system model, to learn the levers that strengthen your strategy practice. Where to play. What to leverage. How to deploy.
As run within the Academy EX Masters Disruptive Tech program, and with Callaghan Innovation’s dynamic capability program for CEOs. Now leveled up with Nature’s disruptive adaptive strategies and design principles.
This course is designed for strategists, business change-agents and start up disruptors. No prior knowledge is required.
Also available in-house, tailored to suit.
bio.t BQ nano course Symbiosis and Ethics
Inhouse only. Public launch 2026.
Online live Zoom | 6 modules | 6 weeks
This is a dedicated course to introduce you to the core principles of how Nature does symbiotic relationships (Nature’s #1 low energy strategy). It helps build up your network / colab / sales partnership skills for re/connecting with your customers, stakeholders, strengthening your colabs, and helping you network and scale.
Each week in turn, we go through a different aspect, to learn the levers that strengthen your partnership practice.
As run within the Academy EX Masters of Disruptive Tech program. Leveled up with Nature’s strategies, and woven in with te ao Māori principles.
This course is designed for social enterprises, entrepreneurs and organizational team leads. No prior knowledge is required.
Also available in-house, tailored to suit.
bio.t BQ nano course Biomimicry
Inhouse only. Public launch 2026.
Online live Zoom | 10 modules | 10 weeks
This is our new course to introduce you to Biomimicry and how Nature innovates and adapts. It helps build up your innovation practice for regenerative disruption.
Each week in turn, we go through a different aspect of what Biomimicry is and how to practice it so you can strengthen your innovation practice. From sensing and processing, to designing, building and networking. Illustrated with cutting edge cross-sector case studies.
Based on Melissa’s MSc in Biomimicry, and her deep research into regenerative disruptive design levers.
This course is designed specifically for designers and innovators. Some prior knowledge is in design thinking is helpful. And no, no science background is needed..
Also available in-house, tailored to suit.
what are Nature’s design thinking capabilities?
and why do they matter?
If we want to tap into the huge market-disrupting opportunities opening up - and strengthen our complex adaptive resilience - we need new capabilities.
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As global markets price in Nature’s living world, there is a rapidly growing global movement amongst business pioneers and disruptive innovators to use a different design thinking playbook.
Not human centred design thinking but life centred design thinking.
Why? Because it doesn’t just protect from risk, it opens up huge market disrupting opportunities for innovation, new revenue streams, and profitable growth.
If we use Nature’s design playbook, we can radically reinvent the business world around us, that’s been designed with dysfunctional 20th (and sometimes 19th) century thinking.
Nature’s design thinking isn’t just less polluting, it’s higher tech, higher performance, higher efficiency, higher scalability and higher resilience.
But it requires a big shift in our strategic thinking and innovation practice.
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The big shift is from human-centred to life-centered thinking. How we sense, sense-make and then seize opportunities. For example:
Instead of asking “how might we?” in an innovation design challenge, we ask “how does Nature?”.
Instead of diagnosing market trends in a strategic review, we diagnose the market ecosystem and industry system that the market rests on.
Instead of using standard systems thinking to aid us in future planning and opportunity mapping, we use Nature’s living systems levers.
Instead of looking at exemplars across industries for design inspiration, we look to champion adaptive species in Nature.
Instead of learning about Nature to manage our footprint, we learn from Nature to emulate the deep design patterns and principles of evolutionary advantage from 3.8B years of R&D practice.
Our sensing, our sense-making, our benchmarking, our seizing of opportunities looks to the functionality of how life functions, in living systems, in lived relationships, leveraging life’s principles.
We get really curious about how Nature solves for the same problems we face. For example:
How does Nature build resilience? How does Nature deal with disruption? How does Nature do resource management? How does Nature do information management?
This is why we call it Nature’s design thinking playbook.
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Design thinking is all about value. Disruptive strategies and innovations are based on how to create, deliver and convert value (into money).
Our research shows that Nature functions by designing across not one, but four value axes. They each work interdependently together.
i. Value flow, ii. Value regeneration, iii. Equitable value exchanges, and iv. Value potentiality.
This matters, massively, if we’re out to disrupt our world. It opens up incredible opportunities strategically, and it deepens our innovation practice.
The good news is we don’t have to be scientists to do this, we don’t even have to be playing in biotech. We just need to be open to a little reprogramming in how we think about value, value risk, and value potential. So that, when we re/engineer our strategy and business models, or re/design our innovations, we’re better able to sense, seize, scale and transform value (the foundation of dynamic capabilities)
If we get technical, it’s a shift from ordinary capabilities => dynamic capabilities => bio-dynamic capabilities. It’s why we call it building your BQ™. Your biological smarts.
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* Poor dynamic capabilities are already cited as the #1 capability barrier behind business innovation and new venture failure. (see links below
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Why do we work like this? Because the rewards are big.
When we use Nature's playbook to better sense, seize and scale, we don’t just play at the highest order of sustainability, we open up the potential for:
New revenue streams
New markets
Scalable demand-led growth
Lower costs
Improved access to capital
De-risked profit margins
(It also brings us all that nice stuff like industry recognition and awards).
Welcome to the bright side.
