Our times demand innovation and a paradigm shift. Biomimicry, which proposes a new and regenerating approach, and which already has a network of innovative, motivated and exciting players, deserved its annual meeting. This is due to a combination of trends and phenomena:

• Biomimicry is in the spotlight. The media is talking about it more and more, applications are developing, the ecosystem is growing and getting organised.
• Biomimicry and bio-inspired approaches are accelerating, the network is becoming more structured and exchanges are increasingly felt to be necessary.
• All the players demand and expect better interactions, collegiality, multiculturalism, synergies and collaborations between scientific disciplines, between large groups and start-ups, between private structures and public bodies, etc.
• Biomimicry certainly consists of doing research in a different way, taking inspiration from the living world to take advantage of the solutions and inventions produced by nature... but nothing will be done by remaining in one's own silos, nothing will be done without the capacity, the ability, to also draw inspiration from others, without opportunities to meet and share.

The future must be bio-inspired to be bio-compatible, and multi-inspired to be creative and innovative.

This event also aims to (re)discover biomimicry. It is therefore intended for scientists and industrialists, but also for public and private decision-makers and managers for whom environmental issues have an impact on daily and strategic choices and/or who are simply looking for inspiration and innovation. Indeed, beyond the scientific aspects, biomimicry also proposes another way of thinking about innovation, cooperation and management.

Although biomimicry is not a scientific discipline as such, it is certainly a network and an ecosystem, perhaps even a sector under construction. Patents are developing, research units (often mixed) are expanding, political and industrial decision-makers are interested, public opinion loves it, training courses are being prepared, etc.

The situation is favourable and presents a combination of accelerating factors for biomimicry (energy costs, search for interdisciplinary agility, need for breakthrough innovations rather than marginal ones, change in understanding of biodiversity, questioning of barriers to entry, crossing of technological thresholds, evolution of mentalities, etc.).

Biomimicry also deserved its own annual event, its own big meeting.

Ecology and environmental issues have long been presented as constraints or moral obligations, but in reality they are opportunities, solutions and allies of economic and social performance.

Our era needs reconnections, between Man and Nature of course, but also between our own spheres, between research and industry, between ecology and the economy, between large groups and start-ups, between biologists and engineers ... these spheres need to speak to each other better, to listen to each other, to exchange. Our sectoral, disciplinary and community 'languages' are our new Towers of Babel, isolating us at a time when we should instead be building and inventing together.

Nature offers us a profound paradigm shift, so that we no longer consider it as a simple stock or a constraint, but rather, beyond a sanctuary to be protected, a veritable laboratory for the world's most efficient technologies and an ecosystemic model of resilience. "It is not Man who will save the planet, but the planet which will save Man.

Biomim'expo proposes to be a connector and translator, a provider of bridges and decipherments, to better understand and translate the excellence of the living world and apply it to human activities, by creating an opportunity for exchanges between bio-inspired experts and other stakeholders, economic, political, academic and industrial.

Alain Renaudin