2025 PRME Education Award

Despite many initiatives in France to promote responsible production and consumption toward final consumers and companies (SDG12), over-consumption and production continue to grow.

We created the Nature-Inspired Innovation & Marketing course to address these issues and propose a sustainable and positive role for marketing.

We advance SDGs and responsible management education thanks to an interdisciplinary approach of teaching. We combine the knowledge from biomimicry about life principles and strategies of the living on earth and marketing as a tool to accompany change in behaviours and develop inspiring storytelling. This course equips students with critical and creative innovation skills while ensuring nature is seen not as a resource to exploit, but as a model for truly regenerative innovation.

The first originality of this course is to use biomimicry knowledge and allow the students to look at nature and life on earth with new eyes. We provide them with a scientific tool to criticize our production and consumption habits, that we seldom question because we take them for granted in our modern world.Using life principles as a reference opens up new imaginaries to look at life on earth, how we consume and produce everyday. For example life does not produce waste. We invite students to compare this life principle with what we do as consumers and managers, and develop critical thinking about it. This course develops strong and embodied critical thinking, thanks to biomimicry, and a look at human consumption practices with a new pair of glasses, before thinking of solutions.

The second originality of this course to advance responsible management education is to invite students to work on a concrete project, a topic they are sensitive to. For example, some of them work on how to reinvent fashion, to keep pleasure in dressing up without compromising life on earth, others work on big events like sports, music festivals, how can we re-imagine them? Students apply their critical thinking and creative tools to a specific case to imagine new ways of doing.

Third, in a traditional marketing course the stakeholders are companies and customers. Here, we train students to have a systemic approach to the problem they address and the solution. They include all stakeholders, including nature.

The main skills students develop in this course are:

- Develop Critical Thinking

- Develop Collaborative Creative thinking

- Adopt Ecosystemic approaches

- Develop Storytelling

Critical thinking is developed through the multidisciplinary approach of the course. Students are invited to look at management and consumption practices with the glasses of another discipline, biomimicry, more particularly life principles.

Collaborative Creative thinking is based on a step-by-step design method with tools and a copy book to document the steps on their creative thinking. The key point of the approach, after the first iterative creative process where students formulate the problem they are going to tackle, is the Ask Nature step. They literally ask nature for solutions. They search for the strategies that living species adopt to solve their problem, to find inspiration. They search for organizational strategies (more than technical solutions) that can inspire management practices.

They adopt an ecosystemic approach by drawing the environment of their project and the interaction they have with their environment; They are invited to evaluate who are their stakeholders and the impact of their project on humans, nature, places, partners…

They develop poetic and inspiring storytelling using living strategies as inspirational metaphors to explain their nature inspired solution.

Learning to ask nature to solve human problems is a key learning of this course.

This is a paradigmatic shift in their relation to nature. They start the course with the modern view of nature as a resource that humans can exploit endless and the course opens new ways of looking at nature, taking nature as model, mentor, and poetic inspiration. Some of them comment at the end of the course “I wouldn’t have imagined taking inspiration from such small species…”

This approach of using biomimicry for dealing with organizational problems has potential not only for topics related to consumption but also for management and organizations. Any management course can take nature as a model, mentor, poetic inspiration to re -imagine management practices. A few examples here:

- Product/service innovation for a sustainable world

- Entrepreneurship and start-ups

- Business model

- Production model (supply chain)

- HR (cooperation)

- Strategy and organization (inspired by natural ecosystems)