Applying the Principles of Biomimicry to Business: Wiebke Liu at TEDxOlympicBlvdWomen

Wiebke Liu is a Fortune 500 executive, McKinsey-trained strategist, consultant, entrepreneur, and proud mother. She combines her passion for business with her love for nature into a quest to help businesses shift to sustainable process and product design. She believes we must leave behind the straight-line industrial age methods of production, and embrace closed-loop processes with zero waste. This is how we will stop maximizing for just a few and start optimizing for all.

Wiebke's business career started in corporate finance at Deutsche Bank and spans consulting at McKinsey & Company, growing internet start-ups, running her own marketing consultancy, and leading marketing functions at Apollo Group, the world's largest online education provider. She has developed consumer brands including Apollo's Balloon.com, an online skills marketplace, and Innovator's Accelerator, the IDEO-designed innovation course with Harvard's Clayton Christensen. She has also designed sales and marketing programs for market leaders including Adobe, AT&T, Expedia, Microsoft, Peet's Coffee, Sun, Target, and the occasional winery.

In her TEDxOlympicBlvdWomen talk, Liu explores nature as the ultimate R&D lab and systems designer. Using examples including slime mold and honey bees, she shows how businesses can drive innovation by studying and mimicking nature. Liu urges businesses to apply nature's blueprints to create win-win value chains with the power to restore our planet.

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In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)