Bioconsciousness
Bioconsciousness is a term we use to group ideas that draw for inspiration on biological processes. It obviously includes the concern over depleted ecological resources and the constraints on our ability to pursue traditional activities, as climate change becomes more debilitating.
BUT we also mean by it a broader change to biology and nature as exemplars for how we should live and work. Whereas trend analysis tells us we should be cautious of urbanisation and that it presents a real danger of economic and social disintegration, people are already engaging with new biological models for co-existence.
Biomimicry, or the use of nature to inspire and instruct on sustainable organisational processes or physical design, is becoming more popular. On the Timeline there are relatively few references to biomimicry even up to 2009. However in the past 12 months there are over 20,000 web page references to the term with nearly 2,000 of these coming in the past week.
As we more readily accept the idea of eco-systems guiding human activity the growth of business eco-systems is also worth looking at. Surprisingly the use of the term “business ecosystem” seems to have peaked in 2006/7 and currently runs at less than a 5:1 ratio biomimicry:business ecosystem. Nonetheless it is not a negligible term.
“Community” is a newly revived term that competes with “eco-system” as the way to describe how people interact around businesses. There are an incredible 2 billion uses of the term community on the web (in other words more than Google can measure from its 8 billion pages) but if that is restricted to “online community” about 1.5 million of these were used in the past 12 months. The United States is the main home of people searching the term “online community”.
