2023-07-23 05:30:00
New technologies have made our imagination lazy, insofar as as soon as we wonder about the future of a profession, an object, a place, a device, a solution, we are tempted to immediately add a digital dimension to it, as if only digital technology could save the world! This is to forget that innovation can take on completely different clothes and that a thousand paths are possible… Nature, moreover, has understood this well, and proceeds in a way that could inspire us. “Nothing is born or perishes, but things that already exist combine and then separate again,” wrote the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras. Nature proceeds by hybridization of existing elements. It is a process in which there is neither creation nor destruction – no offense to Schumpeter! -, but rather permanent metamorphosis. Ex nihilo creations do not exist; no more than absolute disappearances. This gives an astonishing image of Nature, which looks more like a matchmaker than a midwife or an undertaker… If she creates nothing, she innovates, on the other hand by reuse, by circularity, by recycling, by hybridization. No, as the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) reformulated it centuries later, “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”.
But Anaxagoras’ formula was more precise, since it gave details of this transformation: it was a change by combination or “re-combination”. We would do well to draw inspiration from it, because this way of innovating through hybridization is economical: making one thing from several things, making an unusual alloy from several materials, manufacturing a single tool from several tools, using a place for several uses and functions, etc. Create from what already exists, thanks to an unprecedented recombination.
Hybridization could be considered an innovation through recycling. Recycling or circularity moreover constitute the very movement of Nature, of reality. Even our brain recycles old brain functions to perform new ones. Yes, recycling – taking the form of recombination, re-articulation, re-association – is an old habit of the world, except that we have forgotten it and are constantly destroying natural resources.
By reconnecting with Nature, in a logic of biomimicry, we could reclaim its habit of hybridization of matter, by extending it to the material, as well as the immaterial. To create a new world, from other worlds, is also to know how to connect. Where there was segmentation, silos, distinction, identity – that is to say a thousand walls – there can now be combination, pooling, coordination, cooperation, hybridization… that is to say a thousand bridges!
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