Introduction

In the late of the 20th century when the advance of technology ran up against various limitations, an innovative progress became indispensable. Just at this time there was an advent of biomimicry technology focusing on the nature’s survival principles to find out creatures’ traits so that the leap of new technology might be materialized (Lurie-Luke, 2014). Out of the human-centered thinking which had simply considered the nature as the subject of curiosity or development emerged a new way of thinking for learning from the nature to figure out solutions (Lim et al., 2018). Biomimicry a new social technology in the future which applies any basic structure or principle of the ecosystem or of the biological resource so that any environmental or social problems could be solved (Benyus, 1997; Bhushan, 2009), includes approaches for finding out environment-friendly and sustainable solutions through the mimicry of the structures optimized by their adaptation to the environment for a long time and of the efficient strategy for using material and energy (Bae et al., 2019; Geol, 2013; NIE, 2020).

Since most of the biological and ecological principles existing in the nature have the efficiency of remarkably excellent resources, they could be the superb subjects for mimicry (Dickinson, 1999; Stone et al., 2014) and have a strong potential of producing the outcome which is a solution with a high sustainability (Chakrabarti, 2014). In spite of this positive expectation and experimental proof, there exist several limitations to the development of new technology which enables the utilization of the biomimicry, a representative one of which is that, compared with the total amount of the information in the nature, what researchers and engineers can utilize themselves is too little for them to explore the knowledge on the nature for themselves, which can’t help limiting their capability of sorting out the characteristics of biomimicry that are applicable to any problem solving (Kim, 2018; Vincent et al., 2006).

Around the 2000’s, the USA led research of the methods for exploring the biological and ecological information to develop the system which enables the utilization of biomimicry principles (NIE, 2020). In conducted the research for exploring the biological and ecological information for the construction of information and search system (Kim and Lee, 2017; Nagel et al., 2017). It is known that the system providing the most biological system information as of now is furnishing the information on 21,000 genera (Kim and Lee, 2017). Most of the attempts employed for the development of biomimicry technology, however, undergo lots of trial-and-errors before finding out any solutions qualitatively, and those tools used for technology development are too extensive to produce enough solutions. In addition, it is often inevitable that related experts be equipped with not only the knowledge of engineering technology but also the expertise on biological and ecological function, structure, behavior and production so that they may develop new technology (Vincent, 2014).

Therefore, it is necessary that various consumers such as engineers, entrepreneurs and managers as well as researchers should develop a service platform which supports a practical development of biomimicry technology. We suggest a target-model after researching case investigation and interviewing those working in various fields while looking into its expectation effectiveness in order to meet the needs of consumers in different areas and provide the plans for construction and management of a knowledge service platform which enables the support for the development of biomimicry technology.

Materials|Methods

As analysis materials were used the findings from the research of 31 DB’s on biological and ecological information home and abroad, the results from the investigation of the 5 current biomimicry DB’s and the outcomes from in-depth interviews of 17 experts on biomimicry conducted from October 2019 to March 2020 both face-to-face and in written form. First, the biological and ecological information DB constructed home and abroad was analyzed for the classification of basic-data types along with the categorization of the key status of biomimicry DB construction and management into 6 items for appreciation of features. Second, a customer journey map was schematized on the basis of the findings from the interview of related experts so as to examine how those consumers explore biomimicry information and apply it to technology development. Last, a target-model was suggested that enables determining the role of biomimicry knowledge service platform and establishing the plans for its construction and management.

Results

Discussion

Those existing biological and ecological information DB and biomimicry DB was materialized only the simple function for information search. Unlike any common information search, the knowledge-seeking for the development of biomimicry technology is able to extract creative ideas from the fragments of similar knowledge. Therefore, the biomimicry knowledge service platform should realize the pre-and-post management service for the biomimicry ideas which can support the development of biomimicry technology.

The ultimate expectation effects of biomimicry knowledge service platform are the followings: (1) Consumers of biomimicry can search any technical idea very easily and fast, (2) The innovation of biomimicry which has been impracticable due to a knowledge barrier becomes possible, (3) The industrialization of indigenous species in Nagoya Protocol can be accelerated, (4) The decision of technical standards in every industrial field interested in the industrialization of biomimicry technology will become possible, which will be helpful to guiding the development of international standards and leading technology, and finally (5) The biomimicry knowledge service platform will result in the creation of new markets and new industries and then the creation of new jobs.