Twenty years working in nature conservation and following technological breakthroughs... until everything converged.

On 22 April 2024, I signed the articles of incorporation of 361 Creativity and Innovation S.L.U. I chose that date deliberately: it’s Earth Day. The day before, 21 April, happens to be the International Day of Creativity and Innovation, something I didn’t know until then! I could have incorporated the company on that day too, but I figured the notary wouldn’t quite appreciate working on a Sunday!

So the date wasn’t coincidence; it was a statement of intent put on a legal paper… as a project that had started long before, though…

Two decades, two parallel worlds

I have spent over twenty years working in nature conservation. In 2005, within Natura Foundation (“Fundació Natura”) I was part of the launch of CeroCO2, an initiative to calculate, reduce and offset CO2 emissions. In 2012, I co-founded CompensaNatura, an initiative enabling companies and individuals to offset their land cover (i.e. sealed soil footprint) protecting an equivalent area of nature. In 2017, I was a founding partner of Sèlvans, an NGO protecting the last centennial forests of the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean.

At the same time, and almost in parallel, I had been following with growing fascination the technological advances unfolding around us: the rise of the internet, the mobile phone, renewable energy, blockchain, 3D printing, artificial intelligence… not as a passive observer, but as someone trying to understand what all of this means for society, for organisations, for the planet.

For years, these two worlds coexisted in my mind without quite touching each other. Nature on one side. Technology on the other.

The moment it clicked

Through 2023, I started paying closer attention to the technological advances through an accumulation of reading, listening (podcasts), conversations and connections, and one question kept surfacing: how could we apply all of this technology to increase the efficiency of conservation organisations, and thereby accelerate the restoration and conservation of nature?

At the same time, I came across a concept I had first encountered years earlier: biomimicry. In fact, Janine Benyus, the person who brought it into mainstream thinking, gave the opening keynote at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2009, held in Barcelona, which I attended. I remember hearing that talk in awe. But everyday life did what it does, and the idea lay dormant… a seed waiting for the right moment to germinate.

Then, in 2023 and 2024, I encountered it again, and something clicked, irreversibly.

Biomimicry is the discipline that studies how organisms and ecosystems work, and applies those principles to design, engineering, architecture and business. Nature has spent 3.8 billion years solving exactly the same problems that are facing enterprises and organizations today: efficiency with scarce resources, resilience in the face of uncertainty, adaptation to change, regeneration instead of depletion.

And nature does all that without waste. Without energy loss. With a success rate no human laboratory has ever matched.

I had spent twenty years trying to protect the planet’s greatest R&D laboratory, and it had never occurred to me to learn from nature (not only about it). I was so focused on new technologies that I had overlooked the oldest and most proven one: the one that life has been perfecting since the very beginning, without generating waste or depleting the system.

Why ‘361’

The name is not a random number.

There’s a well-known concept of ‘360-degree solutions’: complete vision, analysis from every angle. It’s an excellent aspiration.

‘361’ simply proposes going one step further: seeking that additional perspective — that extra degree — which connects what no one has connected yet.

In our time, and given the urgency of moving towards a more prosperous society and planet — in the most sustainable sense of the word — we need disruption.

What Create361 actually does

Create361 exists to build bridges. Between the proven wisdom of ecosystems, and the most powerful technologies of our time. Between systemic, cross-disciplinary thinking and concrete action. Between ideas that inspire and solutions that actually get applied and create change.

What I bring is twenty years of solving varied and real problems in resource-constrained organisations. I’m finishing my Master’s dissertation in AI and Innovation and advancing a Biomimicry Educator certification, all driven by a single conviction: the problem isn’t a lack of solutions. It’s a lack of connections. It’s a lack of connections.

This blog is the diary of someone searching for those connections, and sharing them as they emerge, without waiting to have everything figured out.

Because if nature teaches us one thing, it’s that the most resilient ecosystems are not the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones that keep all their options and connections alive.

Welcome to Create361.

Have you ever had a moment of convergence like this… one that shed new light on an entire new path forward?