To address Grand Challenges for a sustainable future, incremental progress is insufficient. Transformative technologies are required. However, given the urgency of the sustainable development goals in an environmental and socio-economic context, methodologies to accelerate innovation are required as well. I will briefly discuss Nature-Inspired Chemical Engineering (NICE) as a systematic design methodology to leverage fundamental mechanisms underpinning desired properties in natural systems, like scalability, efficiency and resilience, when developing technologies to address similar issues in engineering problems. This requires careful adaptation of nature-inspired concepts to suit the different context of industrial and societal challenges. A few examples of our work at the UCL Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering will be discussed to illustrate the NICE approach.
