Biomimetics, a name coined by Otto Schmitt in the 1950s for the transfer of ideas and analogues from biology to technology, has produced some significant and successful devices and concepts in the past 50 years, but is still empirical. We show that TRIZ, the Russian system of problem solving, can be adapted to illuminate and manipulate this process of transfer. Analysis using TRIZ shows that there is only 12% similarity between biology and technology in the principles which solutions to problems illustrate, and while technology solves problems largely by manipulating usage of energy, biology uses information and structure, two factors largely ignored by technology.

Our goal is to make biological information available for engineers via a ‘biological patents’ database in TRIZ. However, biological functions need to be co‐ordinated simultaneously at many levels of organization – from cell organelle to population to ecosystem. Each function has links with other functions on different organizational levels. To account for this, we made auxiliary 5D ‘conflict’ matrices for biological structures and environments, and for causes and limits of actions; these allow us to resolve data about organisms into engineering‐like chunks of information and cover the primary TRIZ constituents of ‘function’, ‘effect’ and ‘conflict’. In this way we can also provide a framework for the rationalization and quantification of bionics.

The Russian “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving” was developed to solve technological problems, but it can equally well be applied to biology and the way organisms have solved similar problems. As such it can also be used to bridge the gap between biology and engineering, and to provide a theoretical basis for Biomimetics.

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