Bio-inspired Sustainability Assessment – A Conceptual Framework

Because of the tremendous challenges of the impacts caused by the globally growing economy, the targeted development of sustainable innovation is an inevitable social responsibility. Despite some advances, however, sustainability has not yet been integrated into product development on a broad scale. Although bio-inspired innovations seem to offer solutions, the transfer of sustainability through the bio-inspiration process is only conducted implicitly and the possible fulfilment of the ‘promise of bio-inspiration’ is only assessed retrospectively.