We’re building a bioeconomy. But who’s building the builders?
We can engineer microbes to produce materials without petrochemicals. We can cultivate protein without factory farms. We can transform waste into energy and reprogram cells to heal disease. The technical breakthroughs are real, the innovations stunning, the potential immense.
But there’s a question we’re not asking loudly enough: Who is doing all this regenerating? And are they themselves regenerated in the process?
The Four Pillars—and the Foundation That Holds Them
In their visionary article ‘From the ‘3Fs’ to the Four Pillars: Exploring the Bioeconomy’, Samuel Wines and the CoLabs team articulated a framework for transformation built on four pillars:
Food: “Feeding a growing population doesn’t have to mean more industrial feedlots or factory farms. In the bioeconomy, we get dinner that tastes familiar but comes with a radically different backstory: fewer emissions, less land, more resilience.”
Materials: “Materials can be regenerative, circular, and beautiful. Imagine wardrobes where every garment composts back to soil, or buildings that double as carbon sinks. In the bioeconomy, our material culture stops being a burden and begins to become part of the planetary healing process.”
Energy: “A future where organic waste from farms, forests, and cities isn’t ‘trash’ but feedstock for powering planes, ships… Done well, bioenergy closes loops, builds resilience, and keeps the lights on without turning the planet into Dante’s inferno.”
Health: “Health is both a pillar and a multiplier: it anchors national security, fosters high-value jobs, and accelerates the development of the circular bioeconomy.”
As I read Samuel Wines’s beautifully woven systems thinking—the zooming between microbes and planetary boundaries, the integration of Indigenous knowledge and cutting-edge biotech—I stopped.
I felt surprised. A void. A creative tension.
For me, the most important pillar was missing.
The 5th Pillar: Humans
The founders. The teams. The leaders and communities co-creating this bioeconomy. The very humans whose vision, energy, and ingenuity are supposed to bring regenerative futures into being.
We need an awakening urgently.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth we’re not naming:
· Burnt-out founders cannot build regenerative companies
· Extractive organizational cultures cannot produce regenerative outcomes
· You cannot transform systems without transforming the humans within them
· The bioeconomy isn’t just a technical transition—it’s a cultural, psychological, and relational one
There is a profound symmetry:
· Food, Materials, Energy, Health = the external transformation (what we make and how we make it)
· Humans = the internal transformation (who we are and how we relate)
The fifth pillar doesn’t just support the other four. It makes them possible.
Regeneration as a Fractal Pattern
As Samuel Wines writes, the bioeconomy is “not just one story; it’s many—stacked, nested, and entangled.” Let’s apply that same systemic lens to human regeneration, zooming through three interconnected scales:
The Individual Leader: Regenerating from Within
Regenerative leadership begins with leaders who recognize their own stress levels and depletion—and take conscious steps to replenish their energy. This isn’t self-indulgence. It’s foundational infrastructure.
When leaders serve from a place of groundedness, calm, clarity, joy, abundance and connection—rather than from burnout, anxiety, or scarcity—everything changes. Decision-making shifts. Relationships deepen and innovation flows.
You cannot lead transformation while running on empty. You cannot ask your team to bring their whole selves if you’re only showing up with a fraction of yours.
The question: What does it mean to lead in ways that restore rather than deplete—the self, the team, the ecosystem?
The Team: Regenerating as a Living System
Teams that regenerate don’t just “work together.” They act as one interdependent, dynamic whole. Like mycelium networks or healthy ecosystems, they share resources, communicate richly, adapt to change, and support each other’s thriving.
In regenerative teams:
· Information flows like nutrients through soil
· Conflict becomes compost for growth
· Diversity strengthens rather than fragments
· Each member’s wellbeing is an integral component, not an overhead
When teams consciously design for their own regeneration, they bring exponentially more value through innovation, resilience, and creative problem-solving.
The question: How do companies structure themselves to mirror living systems—with distributed authority, emergence, and adaptive cycles?
The Organisation: Regenerating as an Interconnected Whole
At the macro level, organisations are not separate from nature, community, or society. They are nested within these larger systems, affecting and affected by them in continuous feedback loops.
An organisation that consciously regenerates:
· Recognizes it’s embedded in ecosystems, not above them
· Designs for reciprocity, not just extraction
· Measures success by what it enables to flourish, not just what it captures
· Sees stakeholders as collaborators in a shared web of thriving
When the organisational system regenerates its own culture and practices, its external actions become naturally resilient and beneficial for the planet.
The question: How do we shift from extraction mindset to reciprocity? From competition to collaboration? From growth-at-all-costs to regenerative prosperity?
The False Separation
We’ve been talking about “people and planet” as if they’re separate categories.
They’re not.
Humans are nature. Organisational transformation is ecological transformation. The systemic thinking we apply to bioeconomy design—closed loops, diversity as strength, waste as feedstock—applies just as powerfully to how we design our companies, our teams, and our own lives as leaders.
The bioeconomy will fail if we try to build it with industrial-era operating systems – extraction, domination, separation, endless growth – not running in sync with human consciousness.
It will flourish when we recognize that wellbeing is not a “nice-to-have”—it’s foundational infrastructure. You can’t build regenerative futures from a foundation of depletion.
What This Opens
Adding Humans as the 5th Pillar opens up essential territories for exploration:
1. Regenerative Leadership: Leading in ways that restore rather than deplete—self, team, ecosystem
2. Organizational Design: Companies structured to mirror living systems with distributed authority and adaptive cycles
3. Culture & Consciousness: Shifting from extraction to reciprocity, from competition to collaboration
4. Wellbeing as Infrastructure: Making regeneration foundational, not optional
5. Learning & Unlearning: Releasing industrial-era operating systems and growing new capacities for complexity, emergence, and care
An Invitation to Reflect
As Samuel Wines powerfully reminds us: “Collectively, we need to grow an economy that doesn’t just sustain life—it amplifies it.”
But we cannot amplify life in the external world while depleting it in ourselves, our teams, and our organizational cultures.
So I leave you with these questions:
What does this provoke in you?
What steps do you want to take towards a regenerative future:
· Towards yourself and your own capacity as a leader?
· Towards the way you do business?
· Towards your team or community?
The bioeconomy needs brilliant innovations in fermentation, materials science, and biomanufacturing.
But even more urgently, it needs parallel innovation in how we show up as humans—how we lead, how we collaborate, how we replenish ourselves so we can serve the larger transformation from a place of wholeness rather than depletion.
The 5th pillar isn’t separate from the other four.
It’s the living soil beneath them all.