Regenerative Platform Business Models
What I am going to talk about today is a concept of natural and organic evolution that fits with our inner desires to “do good”, to take care of our living systems, of ourselves and our peers, with love and compassion, as if everything matters, coming back to our roots, in nature’s perfect harmony.
In a world that is failing in its deepest foundations — from lack of trust in institutions to growing levels of inequality, climate, health and social crisis and a degenerative and extractive economic model that drowns us, humans and nature — people and organizations all over the world are engaging in a different mindset, a holistic one, based on living systems principles.
The aim is that of regenerating, restoring, renewing damaged ecosystems or using this mindset as a principle of design.
Regenerative design is drawing widespread attention, although it is not a new concept. One of the first places was seen the use of the term regeneration was in Buckminster Fuller’s design work in the 1960s.
“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.” — R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb
In 1980, the term was coined to define regenerative agriculture, or permaculture, to describe a series of farming practices that prioritise healthy soils, biodiversity and holistic ecosystem restoration. In the last years, regenerative design has been applied in fields of urbanism, architecture, finance, tourism, production, value chains, leadership and organizations, gaining momentum.
There is no single definition of what regenerative design means, similarly to what happened with the collaborative economy movement in its early days, and although it can be counterproductive to become the new buzzword, the regenerative design does have a series of more or less common principles and shared values for those who want to embrace it.
In the last 2 years, I have been studying the intersections between regenerative design and platform design. My fascination for both topics led me to start running a series of interviews with experts in the field and participate in global forums and events in order to go deeper into understanding their confluences.
Drawing on this exploration, this article is part of a series in what I have called “Regenerative Platform Business Models”. My hope is to provide an understandable framework for the ones that have a platform and want to become regenerative in creating value and for those that have a regenerative business and want to become a platform.
Regenerative Design and Platform Design are both under the umbrella of system thinking, which Peter Senge, who is a leader in the field, defines as:
“A way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behaviour of systems, in tune with the natural processes of the natural world… A discipline for seeing wholes and a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots” — Peter Senge
Both concepts provide a lens from which to observe events, a mindset widely believed to be critical in handling the complexity facing the world in the coming decades.
Regenerative design or Regeneration draws from the sources of living system thinking, according to James Grier Miller, an American biologist and a pioneer of systems science, Living systems are open self-organizing life forms that interact with their environment.
What the purpose of regeneration is?
“The purpose of regeneration is the same that the purpose of life itself, is to create the right conditions for all life to thrive and flourish.” — Anna Pollock
What about platforms?
Platform (or Ecosystem-Network) Design is a business model innovation used to define strategies that connect, in a given context, individuals or organizations in a p2p relationship, which means directly, to create value.
According to the World Economic Forum, an estimated 70% of new value created in the economy over the next decade will be based on digitally enabled platform business models. Contrary to traditional models, platforms are capable of meeting personalized needs more economically.
Today 60% of the global population have access to the internet, of which almost 97% have a smartphone, with a remarkable level of growth: +7% of internet users during the past 12 months due to lockdowns, compared to 2020.
Covid-19 has speeded the adoption of digital technologies by several years, and many of these changes could be here for the long haul, with many people moving their shops online, the share of digital or digitally enabled products in companies portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years.
Platforms of course have their own challenges, but they are good tools for coordinating decentralized and interconnected networks, strategies owned by an organization or fully decentralized like is the case of platform cooperatives, in some cases supported by blockchain’s mindset technologies.
Nobody taught us what it means to be human, but we love questions, so we have to ask ourselves:
What is our role in this system?
As consumers, we’re gaining more and more power, having access to thousands of platforms in different areas of our lives changing not only habits and behaviours but also expectations related to the role that private and public organizations are or could have in society.
“Brands will be even more evaluated based on the social good they create in their communities and how responsible they are in their supply, manufacturing and production….The pre-Covid crisis consumer-centric brand strategy is now society-centric strategy.” — Ana Andjelic
Climate, health and social crisis have made us rethink what kind of brands we want to interact with, how products are made, what we are eating, wearing, consuming. We can no longer blind ourselves to what is happening in the world and how it affects us directly. Because we are a global community in a common world.
Other questions that drive this research are:
What is the social or public role of organizations? How can we give back more than take it out? How can we restore systems at different levels? How can we localize, distribute and diversify production? How can we maximize health in the entire ecosystem? How can we create value tailored to a specific context thinking not only across space but also in time? What is the outcome we all want? How can we design for resilience? How can we leverage nature’s abundance without compromising its health?
“A species can only thrive when everything else around it thrives. If we take care of nature, nature takes care of us” -David Attenborough
So, we have two models:
1- The platform business model is an outside-in strategy; it looks at the ecosystem — understood as a system of interconnected actors that coordinate their activity with a common objective — to facilitate value creation through a platform, a place to interact and evolve.
Platform models are also being applied to organizational design with promising results.
Platforms geolocalize value creation, reduce barriers to entry allowing more people to participate, connect directly producers with consumers, reduce asymmetry of information and are more transparent.
2- Regenerative design is about regenerating healthy conditions which create new potential, in an ecosystem that is alive and constantly changing.
Regeneration is a verb To Regenerate. It is not about being, but about becoming — an open-ended process.
Regeneration is intentional.
Now, the question is: what if we merge both?
They are the same with some small big differences.
The most important is that Regeneration adds a higher layer, the intention of regenerating or being regenerated.
Regeneration is also an inside-out virtuous loop process: without awareness, nothing happens.
Together, can scale across more easily thanks to network effects.
“Regeneration is instantaneous, but the steps leading to it are often gradual, and none of them can be skipped”.- Talbot Wilson Chambers
In the next article, I will explore deeper both principles of design, their commonalities and differences and how they benefit each other integrating the whole mindset.
Stay tuned!
