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Innovative Animals

By Peter Lloyd

What would you call the familiar, plastic packaging device that holds your six-pack together? Koko the gorilla speaks with the help of a word board--a tool that lets her point to icons that represent words. It's said that she used her word board to describe the six-pack holder as "bottle necklace."

I don't know about you, but I'm impressed. Maybe even a little humbled.

In her Science News article "The Search for Animal Inventors" Susan Millius offers several examples of animals whose behavior some would call innovation. Like the chimp who bangs empty kerosene cans together to amplify his threat display.

Are Koko and clever chimps innovating in the same sense that we people do? Let the debate rage, because when it comes to gaining inspiration from animals, it doesn’t really matter what we call what they do. As far as I’m concerned, animals can inspire creative thinking whether or not they are displaying innovation rather than some sort of highly refined instinct.

In our book and problem-solving process Animal Crackers, Stephen Grossman and I work from a more fundamental premise--that Mother Nature has already solved all possible problems. The animal behavior we use as stimulation in Animal Crackers doesn't have to be human-like, intentionally innovative behavior in order to be useful.

We take inspiration, for example, from the very effective behavior of the skink lizard. When pursued by a predator, skink will drop off his own tail. While his predator feeds on his tail, skink gets away. This clever little critter inspired me to write and record the song Skink the Lizard and to spell out the lessons he teaches in a radio vignette. In short--if you have a problem, there may be a part of it you can discard. Or give to someone else to chew on.

Grossman and I are certainly not alone in our passion for the problem-solving potential of animals. All kinds of biological behavior serve as inspiration for the folks at Natural Logic. On its website, founder Gil Friend reminds us that, "Nature's ecosystems have 3.85 billion years of experience in creating efficient, adaptive, resilient, sustainable systems. Why reinvent the wheel, when the R&D has already been done?"

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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