Humans are social beings, mimicking each other from the moment they tumble into the world. To say as much isn’t really to say too much. It’s something an army of developmental psychologists have written about and followed over the years.

Marketeers understand this very well. It’s how trends gain legs. We emulate what’s cool. We emulate who’s cool. We’ll even throw on a musky cologne precisely because we’re social beings emulating what and who’s cool.

If we can’t be like Mike, at least we can smell like him. Or Paris. Or Beyonce. Or Carlos Santana (Ed. Note: we have to admit we didn’t know about this one… and look forward to discovering what a sweaty guitarist actually smells like).

Understood differently, we like to point out Mark Earls’ simultaneously enlightening and frightening thesis that we’re merely herd animals. (Ed. Note: Enlightening because it tells us why the iPod takes off. Frightening because it gives a sense of why mob-mentality is always on the horizon).

So while we’re social creatures mimicking those around and about us, there’s very little that points to how we emulate — and learn from that which is beyond us. Very little, indeed, about how we interact with our actual environment. Very little about how we, as humans, understand our human experience as two-legged bipeds in a race for survival on an indifferent spinning globe.

If we bring it a step further, while we’re known to emulate the humans around us, there’s not much to suggest that we emulate the nature around us. And when we actually do, our language constructs it in the negative: don’t eat like a pig, don’t monkey around, don’t be a chicken, don’t chew like a cow.

Sometimes it takes the brunt voice of a biologist to slap us into cognition.

Like say, Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute and author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.

Biomimicry is a design idea that specifically looks at — and emulates — naturally occuring phenomena in order to develop sustainable technologies. Examples include those Janine mentions in the video above, as well as air conditioning inspired by termite’s ability to build homes that maintain constant temperatures despite existing in extreme conditions; creating adhesive glue from mussels; and the development of hyper-strong fibers by emulating spider’s silk.

Beijing’s famed Water Cube reached new heights in environmental design in part by using the natural formation of bubbles in soap foam to help insulate it.

While the industry is young, its environmental, social and economic impact is increasingly considerable with both industries and communities clamoring for cleaner, greener, more natural carbon neutral solutions to our everyday needs.

And perhaps, as more people focus on design processes biomimicry, the linguistics of emulation will change. Perhaps, one of these days, it’ll be just fine to eat like a pig.

About this Video

Road to Innovation is a ScribeMedia/BrainJuicer co-production and includes interviews from leading practitioners and thinkers in the corporate, scientific, branding and media space as we explore change, disruption and innovation across various industries.

You can view a growing video library here, or follow via RSS here.

It’s a story that repeats itself throughout the business cycle: upstart company causes upheaval and disruption throughout the market place. Said company then takes its place among the industry elite, coasts on its laurels and becomes at best irrelevantly successful and at worst the victim of the next upstart.

About this Video

Road to Innovation is a ScribeMedia/BrainJuicer co-production and includes interviews from leading practitioners and thinkers in the corporate, scientific, branding and media space as we explore change, disruption and innovation across various industries.

You can view our growing video library here, or follow us via RSS here.

Think Nike, no longer the brand innovator that burst on the scene by fashioning the feet of Michael Jordan. Or Microsoft, now fudging its way through desktop operating systems no one really wants while companies like Google have already moved to the computational cloud.

The issue here is one that befuddles corporate culture: once you corner the market do you batten down the hatches and defend your turf, or do you continue to take risks and branch out into into the perpetual unknown?

Or, as market researcher, founder and CEO of BrainJuicer, John Kearon puts it, are you a farmer who harvests what you’ve planted, or a pioneer seeking new fields to sow? Do you seek incremental change or strive for the game changer?

More often than not, successful companies farm while fighting for market share, but in that fight for market share they also recognize the need and value of true innovation. The question becomes, can they do it?

There’s an inherent tension to this process. On the one hand, a corporation needs the cultural flexibility to take risk, move outside its comfort zone, interact with outsiders and constantly think itself anew. On the other, a corporation needs to do all this while not distracting itself from their core.

“WD-40 is the golden goose,” explains Graham Milner, Executive Vice President, Global Development and Chief Branding Officer of WD-40, when discussing the company’s open innovation approach. “Your job is to get more golden eggs, but whatever you do, do not kill the golden goose. And killing the golden goose is a lot about don’t mess with success. Don’t fix that which isn’t broken.”

The innovation challenge remains though, and corporations are creating often autonomous innovation teams to deal with the task.

For example, in the video above, Kearon talks with Russ Conser, General Manager, GameChanger, Shell; David Thomas, European Innovation Leader, Mars Europe; Kevin G. McFarthing, Director, Strategic Alliances, Reckitt Benckiser, Milner and others about the challenges they face, the failures they’ve endured and the success they look forward to in the future.

When the iPod came to market in 2001, technophiles waxed rhapsodic and it quickly became the must-have gadget among the geek chic.

Sales, of course, didn’t stop there. The pure lustiness of it all catapulted the device to iconic status with the iPod’s white headphones doing for consumer electronics what the Nike swoosh did for sneakers.

But what actually happened that brought the iPod to global status symbol while earlier MP3 players like the Diamond Rio ended up in the historical dust bin?

Mark Earls writes in Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature that traditional marketers completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behavior. Instead of a direct relationship between brand and individual, our instinct is to look at what others around us are doing, using and possessing, and emulating that behavior.

Think the ubiquity of text messaging, the explosion of the Internet itself and the crowding of social networking sites: all examples of activities that entered daily activity not so much because of top down marketing, but because each lubricated the social interaction of those among us.

In the video above, John Kearon, Chief Juicer of market research firm BrainJuicer, and Earls discuss specific examples of this phenomenon, how the advertising and marketing industry has changed over the years, and what all this means for products, brands and those that create and market them.