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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS146

nature’s crisp solution Pringles Potato Crisps offer a particularly
striking example of successful bionics. Consulting firm Synectics, Inc.
was given the challenge of how to place more potato crisps on
supermarket shelves. By containing significant amounts of air,
conventional crisp bags occupied valuable space. If the product and its
packaging could be compressed, the client company could increase its
sales volume.

To solve this problem, Synectics, Inc. sought analogies from nature for
the principle of compression. An example which leapt out was leaves.
When crushed and mixed with water, the leaves would remain but
would occupy much less space. The principle was applied across to
potato crisps – water was mixed with dehydrated potatoes, the mixture
was shaped, stacked and placed in the cylindrical packaging which has
now become an integral part of the Pringles brand.

children’s bubbles to underpin a building? Completed in 2001,
the Eden Project created a living theatre of plants from a disused china
clay pit in Cornwall. Because the pit was still being mined
commercially during the structure’s design phase, the architects were
designing on a site which was constantly changing. It is never a good
idea to build on shifting sand, but that is literally the problem which
the designers faced.

The breakthrough came from watching soap bubbles. In his compelling
account of the Eden Project, visionary founder Tim Smit recalls playing
the children’s game of blowing soap through a little hoop and noticing
how the bubbles settled, adapting to whatever surface they landed on.
The observation that where two or more bubbles landed adjoining each
other, the line of join was always exactly perpendicular, provided the
breakthrough which the project needed: ‘By using this model, one can
see that it is possible to develop a design that can adapt to whatever the
surfaces beneath it are doing . . . Soon a model was created . . . The
moment we saw it, we loved it, because it felt natural.’115

Cover the right-hand side of Table 4.7 and try to identify the products
and artefacts which have been inspired by the natural phenomena
listed in the left column.