The New Bioeconomy

• Thoughts on the Bioeconomy - Clearly, access to knowledge, skills and technology is the key to global growth and development of this new economic opportunity. But in the New Bioecomony, the access to the benefits of the new technologies is much simpler. Technology can (for example) be packaged in a seed!
• BioEconomy Partners - A Global Revolution is Underway - To provide the technology and business development support needed to grow businesses and create jobs in the Buffalo Niagara Region based on renewable plant and animal based materials.
  To create a BioIndustry regional hub supporting a cluster of businesses and educational/research institutions, whose commercial focus is creating and manufacturing new products based on renewable resources.
  To reinvigorate the Western New York manufacturing economy through the creation of these new companies, products and jobs.
• The BioEconomy -- Sciences for a new millennium: Towards a life science plan forAlberta - Life sciences are the sciences for the new millennium. Around the world, the life sciences sector is poised to take off to a degree that is sometimes difficult to imagine. Solid research and ideas are being transformed into commercial products and viable solutions. Technologies are converging with science and producing spin-off benefits in other related areas. Rapid advances and new discoveries are fueling not only the imagination of scientists and industry leaders, but also stimulating investment and support by those who see the potential benefits these discoveries can provide.
• A Few Ideas from Stan M. Davis - Stan M. Davis is widely recognized as a visionary on the information economy on the foundations of wealth, the new bio-economy, connectivity, emotional bandwidth and mass customization.
• The New Bioeconomy - Why are we what we are?
  Will our genes determine the job we get one day?
  The rough answer to the alphabet of life was spelt out with the draft completion of the Human Genome Project. Now it is up to the world, including Singapore, to decipher just what this means, and to seize the new opportunities in the quest for better lives for all.
  Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Dr Tony Tan tells Channel NewsAsia's Fiona Tan how Singapore intends to ride the new economic wave. Hear it too from the major players.
  Life will never be the same again, simply because...
  That's Life - The New Bioeconomy.
• New Economy Strategies - Several papers in pdf format discussing aspects of the new bioeconomy and regional development.
• Journal of Bioeconomics Volume & Issue Summary
• Center for Business Innovation - Monsanto, once a classic industrial company that made chemicals, has now gone post-modern. Its genetically modified crops designed to yield better harvests, resist pests, or to do the work of both food and medicine, are, ultimately, new arrangements of ancient genetic instructions. In other words, Monsanto has shifted its focus and is on the forefront of creating an entirely new industryóone that is driving us toward the bioeconomy.
  In order to understand the rules of this new economy - rules derived from the world of biology - we brought together Monsanto's CEO and industry innovator Robert Shapiro and theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman to exchange ideas. Their conversation addressed biologically inspired technologies, organizational forms, and pathways for innovation. Science writer David Berreby directed their conversation.
• Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem
• Living Economies Essay - The global corporations that are the ruling institutions of the suicide economy are required by law, structure, and the imperatives of global finance to maximize financial returns to absentee owners without regard to the consequences for people or planet. In short, they are programmed to behave like cancers that seek their own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences. As these pathological institutions have consolidated their power, the imperatives of global finance have come to dominate the economic, political, and cultural lives of people, communities, and nations everywhere.>br> The human future depends on moving beyond the self-limiting and ultimately self-destructive ways of Empire to live into being a new Era of Community in which life is the defining cultural value, cooperation and partnership are society's organizing principles, and networking is the predominant organizational form. The culture and institutions of the global suicide economy must be replaced by the culture and institutions of a planetary system of living economies that mimic the behavior of healthy living organisms and ecosystems.
• Living Economies: Lessons from Biology - New biological information on nucleated cells, multicellular bodies and mature ecosystems as cooperative enterprises challenges our ingrained view of antagonistic competition as the sole driving force of evolution, which was adopted s the rationale for capitalist competition. But, as George Soros says, "there is something wrong with making the survival of the fittest a guiding principle of civilized society. This social Darwinism is based on an outmoded theory of evolution." (Soros, The Capitalist Threat, cover article of the February 1997 Atlantic Monthly).
• Economies For Life - Now, with the revelations of high-profile corporate fraud and corruption, I sense a dramatic change. While the political power brokers talk of new rules and penalties to restore confidence in financial markets, members of religious orders and congregations, community groups, city officials, business people, and young activists are talking about the possibility of far greater changes‹of creating truly new economies. They speak of real wealth as a sense of belonging, contribution, beauty, joy, relationship, and spiritual connection. They share their dreams of a world of locally rooted living economies that meet the material needs of all people everywhere, while providing meaning, building community, and connecting us to a place on the Earth.
• Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things - This book surveys the Ònew biologyÓ - human systems and machines that work like living things - which is now transforming pretty much every field of human activity. So throughout the book thereÕs no shortage of next wave technologies like emotional computers and ships that swim like fish; or of innovative efforts to model large-scale human systems on ecological dynamicsÑas in farms that grow like prairies, or schemes linking global money flows to the energy flows in nature.
  But more than that, because the new biology is transforming so many different fields at once, I think the world is entering a major sea change - one poised to have as great an impact now as the machine age did on the feudal world that it replaced. This is where the insights from emergence and complexity come in. Seen through them, what looks like a third great phase of human cultural evolution appears to be taking shape.

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