Bio Inspired Innovation

The Bio Inspired Innovation (BINN) Master’s programme is designed to prepare students for the nature-based solutions future. The programme can be tailored to fit your own career goals. Whether that be getting a PhD, and working in academia or a research institute, or moving into the business and start-up world. Our graduates are change agents for the bio inspired circular economy, embedding themselves into organisations and showing their colleagues the ecological, social and fiscal benefits of the bio inspired approach.

The programme provides students with soft skills like ideation, systems mapping and stakeholder management and hard skills like life cycle assessment, ecosystem services mapping and developing of business models. Evidence from our outgoing graduates shows that this helps students find jobs quickly and in a wide range of fields.

For major research projects, Bio Inspired Innovation is situated in The Institute of Environmental Biology within the Faculty of Science which gives us access to research groups including Fungal Biology, Plant Microbe interactions and Ecology & Biodiversity. This gives our students access to answer the fundamental problems preventing progress.

BINN also has a network of NGOs, Start-ups, scale-ups, companies and governmental departments to provide students with options in a variety of non-academic environments and to go ‘beyond the lab'. This includes permaculture collectives, design organizations, sustainability consultants, nature transformation landscapers, bio-based economy business clusters and climate action NGOs.

These options become very interesting in the second year of the master when students can choose the ‘General research project-profile’ and during our second-year course, which works with stakeholders to provide case studies for nature-based solutions. For examples, see the Utrecht University Theses Repository and search Bio Inspired Innovation under subjects.