BioInspired! So What? Now What!

How can we create businesses that are financially rewarding, socially beneficial, and environmentally regenerative - flourishing business? In this one-off event, we will explore and experience a new visual studio approach to designing flourishing business.

You will develop an understanding of and then experience a new collaborative visual design process, to create business models for flourishing enterprises. The objective of this new approach is to enable leaders and collaborative teams to systematically envision and design the factors necessary, to facilitate transformation toward strongly sustainable outcomes*. 

This workshop introduces collaborative, visual sense making tools and processes developed at OCAD University by the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group - specifically the Flourishing Business Canvas.

Discover next-generation collaborative visual design tools for modelling flourishing enterprises in any sector. 

At this workshop, you will:

• learn and understand an innovative approach to co-creating business models for flourishing enterprises, based on economic, social, and environmentally-effective design principles
• gain an expanded appreciation of the challenges facing leaders as they move their organisations toward flourishing, and a set of tools for designing resolutions to those challenges
• discover the next generation collaborative visual model design tools for modelling flourishing enterprises in any sector
• be equipped to begin use the tool after the workshop in the evaluation of existing enterprises, and to envision new initiatives.

You will explore elements of a new language to describe, discuss and tell stories about the business models of flourishing enterprises. In small groups we will discover the challenges imposed on current business models by current socio-cultural-economic norms, and review some key future concepts required for flourishing business models. Participants will explore how the elements of this language are structured in the Flourishing Business Canvas visual design tool. 

We work with a case study of a food processing business, striving to create a range of flourishing outcomes for its many stakeholders (a certified Benefit Corporation). The Flourishing Business Canvas enables the description, evaluation, diagnosis, assessment, design and stories about flourishing businesses. Participants will take away their own worked example to further explore dynamics and business models for their flourishing enterprise. You will be invited to share in an appreciative design critique of the tools, and offer feedback for its evolution and further development.