Introduction

As Neal Gershenfeld puts it, ” The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.”

Welcome to the Think Act Regenerate podcast, where we explore the rich smorgasbord of business and career opportunities that today’s commercial and regenerative solutions offer. This podcast was recorded and produced on Wurundjeri country In Naarm, Melbourne, Australia I’m Leigh Baker, your host for this episode.

As a supply chain consultant turned writer, I’ve been watching entrepreneurial thinkers commercialise today’s powerful regenerative solutions since 2002. I’ve distilled my observations – or insights- insights that I assess are accelerating the spread of today’s commercial and regenerative solutions. This podcast episode is number eight in an ongoing series that explores those 10 insights.

Not all the 10 insights will apply to all individuals or all businesses, but they are fundamental and growing mindset shifts that are well worth understanding. You can listen back to past episodes for the previous seven insights, and there’s a full transcript of each, along with useful links and posts on the Think Act Regenerate website.

In the first six insights, we talked about key approaches to regenerative business strategy and design. We talked about what’s happening today, about the growing range of opportunities, about the goal of regeneration, about circular design, product as a service, nature-based biomimicry innovation, and 3D safety.

Now we’re focusing more on the how of regenerative business execution, the smarter strategies and skills that enable better results faster. Our previous episode, Insight Seven, discussed the power of systems awareness.

Insight 8 Introduction – small, smart, local, regenerative

[00:03:00] In this episode, we’re exploring Insight Eight. the opportunities and advantages of small, smart, locally generated and globally informed solutions. We’re talking about meeting local needs using local resources. We’re talking about utilising local wisdom and leveraging global know-how. We’re talking about regenerating local ecosystems and local economies and local communities.

We’re going beyond 20th century prescriptive, top-down, big volume, expert-driven approaches. ‘ Big global solutions onto communities What we’re talking about is respectful innovation driven from the bottom up and from the edges inwards. Innovation done by developing and supporting well-informed, locally oriented, right-sized solutions.

The limitations of BIG solutions

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a major mindset in building both industries and infrastructure has been to centralize, globalize, commodify, and push, delivering commodity products and services out to global markets.

In the 21st century, this default thinking about big push standardized solutions, particularly solutions ” from the government”, is a bit overused, and in many cases has led to social and ecosystem harms

This ” build it big” mindset was the default for a lot of first generation sustainability campaigns, driven by assumptions about big infrastructure delivered by big organizations- as though that was a core need.

This becomes even more of a problem because of a feature of human communication. That is ” what’s focal becomes seen as causal”.

What this means is that repeated exhortations to ” that that’s what there is to do, that “fixing the environment” is up to government because it requires big, costly solutions.

But bigger isn’t always better. The big systems that deliver mains water and electricity come with a whole range of issues. Yes, they add value, and they have drawbacks .

Big systems have big losses from small leakages that multiply. Electricity transmission losses in Australia run at around 10%. The World Bank estimates that so-called non-revenue water losses, the water that goes – into a water system but doesn’t come out the tap, run at about 8.6 trillion gallons each year. It’s a lot of water.

Big systems usually come with big secondary resource usages. For example, mains water systems need electricity to keep them pressurized. Coal power stations need plenty of water to wash the coal before they burn it to prevent coal dust [00:06:00] explosions.

Big systems come with big failure impacts

Think about what happens when a water main bursts. how many people are impacted when the power goes out after a road traffic crash?

Big systems are vulnerable to disasters electricity networks lose poles, wires, and substations to wildfire and flood- and those losses in turn create household losses of food and communications.

Not only do big systems have their limitations, government-delivered solutions don’t always deliver effectively or equitably.

There’s a place for big systems and there’s a place for top-down approaches. However, there are also plenty of opportunities to act locally, particularly in a world of increasing complexity and rapid change.

And while a lot of environmental and sustainability solutions started out as expensive whims, after 20 and 30 years of innovation, sometimes more, not only are they not expensive, They’re also often Opportunities to make a place better, opportunities that combine local knowledge and local resources with carefully chosen relevant global solutions.

Small, smart, local regeneration

What’s proving more effective in many situations, particularly when done using practical implementation tools, is to intentionally explore for small, smart, local regenerative opportunities. Opportunities to make a place better. Opportunities that combine local knowledge and local resources with carefully chosen relevant global solutions. Using approaches that meet local needs and fill local niches.

So what does this mean for SMEs and citizen innovators? It means there’s more to do than wait for big governments and big businesses.

Change has always bubbled up from the bottom and inwards from the edges of human systems. Facebook got started in a college dorm. Nike got started in a spare bedroom Patagonia began when Yvon Chouinard started making himself and his friends less damaging climbing gear using a secondhand forge

Australian solar entrepreneurs and innovators have spent decades building good renewable energy solutions in both business and community cooperatives. They were acting well in advance of governments

There’s a rich and growing collection of smart regenerative solutions that don’t require us to wait for “the authorities” to “change their policies” or for big corporations to build out big solutions and deliver big infrastructure.

[00:09:00] And a good thing about regenerative solutions is that they generally multiply each other’s benefits.

Eating a plant-rich diet improves your health as well as reducing your ecosystem footprint. Fixing a leaking tap saves on the energy used to pressurise the water mains, as well as saving you on your water bill. Putting solar panels on your roof not only gives you increased energy independence, protection from outages, and reduced emissions, it also increases the likelihood of your neighbours following your example and your whole neighbourhood becoming more energy independent.

Increasing urban green spaces with micro forests and urban farms lowers local temperatures and mitigates urban heat island effects. Microforests and urban farms also enhance air and water quality. They soak up excess rain to reduce flooding, they increase wildlife habitat even in the city, and they provide mental health benefits to city dwellers and workers.

Getting your business involved in a relevant local Circular Economy Project is a whole new networking opportunity, as well as opening up potential cost savings and supply options. Installing a no permits required, smart, device level battery on your commercial refrigerator not only protects your business from peak energy costs, it also helps smooth grid demand and protects your stock if the power goes out.

As the Kev Carmody song reminds us, from little things, big things grow.

Solutions are scaling – IF you look

Sadly, today’s hundreds of small, smart, accessible solutions don’t get a whole lot of consistent publicity in the mainstream. So if you’re not tuned into them or you don’t go looking for them, you could miss out on their opportunities. But just because they don’t get consistent attention, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or they don’t work, or they’re not worth the bother

It’s not just end solutions that are available either.

As well as a wide range of small, smart solutions that can be delivered locally, there’s also a growing range of practical, accessible tools. Tools to help you identify and source solutions, tools to help you co-design those solutions for local success, and tools to help you deliver your chosen solutions more effectively.

And once you start looking, there’s a growing number of regional and community action groups around, so you may not need to start something, you might just need to find something to join.

Recognising that there’s a rich world of opportunity, one that’s been hidden by traditional top-down big thinking, is the first step in finding your opportunities Once you’ve decided to explore beyond big solutions from above, You’ll be surprised what you start to see.

Blue Economy introduction

[00:12:00] There’s a number of different frameworks and approaches

One straightforward set of principles that’s a useful starting point is called The Blue Economy by Gunter Pauli.

Belgian entrepreneur and thought leader Gunter Pauli spent decades researching practical, actionable, sustainable business solutions starting in the 1990s. He wrote about this approach, one that he called the blue economy, and published the results of his work in 2010 as a report to the sustainability think tank The Club of Rome.

Why a blue economy? Because the sea is blue, the sky is blue, and the Earth seen from space is blue. Green is a composite

Blue is a pretty popular colour, and if you look up blue economy you’ll find ocean-based content on the first couple of pages of your search engine results. But the earlier Pauli blue economy is still there and still relevant. And that’s what we’ll go with today because it’s nice and straightforward.

Pauli’s approach combines smart nature-based solutions, which we covered in an earlier episode on biomimicry, with an approach called systemic design and we talked about systems in the previous episode.

The fundamental principles of Pauli’s blue economy are:

– meet local needs

– using local resources and

-creating local jobs

– BY combining local knowledge AND global know-how

Stories are worth a ton of theory. So here are some stories framed around those principles you’ll find links to these stories in the show notes, along with resources and sources. If you’re a person who learns by writing, then note take away. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy listening.

Meeting local needs and creating local jobs

Rooftop solar is a way of meeting local needs and creating local jobs.

While the solar industry is pretty big around the world and growing rapidly, it didn’t start that way. Small, innovative businesses and passionate citizen entrepreneurs in community cooperatives have been leading the way for decades.

Totally Renewable Yackandandah is a highly successful community renewable energy cooperative in rural Victoria.

Totally Renewable Yackandandah started as a buying group in two thousand and fourteen, then put in some community batteries, then upgraded to a community virtual power plant. They’ve even gone on to start their own approved energy retailer so they can trade their power in the wider commercial market but the need they set out to fulfill wasn’t in the first instance, cleaner [00:15:00] power and less emissions.

Their focus was energy independence and supply resilience because their rural Victorian region wasn’t getting reliable electricity or responsive service from their historic big grid wholesaler.

The Yackandandah Cooperative use their bigger local installations to increase the resilience of their community infrastructure, installing batteries and rooftop solar into places like the local fire station, the public hall, the local aged care, and the local sports centre, and then connecting all those pieces of infrastructure into a community virtual power plant.

It’s a great story, and the Yackandandah community is not an isolated example. Australia’s Coalition for Community Energy has more than 100 member organizations around Australia. Their coalition includes community groups building locally owned solar farms that offer clean power to local renters, people who don’t own their premises but still want and need affordable clean energy

Regeneration starts with place and finding a regenerative opportunity starts with understanding local needs and local goals and putting your assumptions on hold so you can see what’s there

Small, smart local solutions leverage local resources. big solution thinking tends to push big standard solutions, but that can ignore local resources and their opportunities. So thinking in terms of ” what do we have ?” is another starting point for opportunity spotting.

Use local resources to meet local needs

Solar energy is great, unless you live in heavily forested hills. So what do you do in cool, temperate forested areas? The Warburton Community Hydro Project is a community-led run-of-river hydroelectric system on a creek of the Yarra Ranges. It diverts part of the flow of a local creek through a small turbine before returning the water to the creek, and it includes fishways to protect local wildlife

In a different example and a different environment, using local resources can involve local materials resources. In Western Australia, a company called Biofil offers EV charging stations using generators powered by waste cooking oil to remote roadhouses that sell fast food as well as fuel, and have a lot of used cooking oil. It’s a situation-specific waste-to-energy solution, meeting a waste handling challenge as well as an energy need.

Sometimes the local resource in question can just be a bit of mechanical smarts.

A regional Victorian food manufacturing plant a few years ago reduced its process water cooling costs by piping the hot water from one of their production processes through a secondhand car radiator they installed on the factory roof using an idea that came from the factory floor

[00:18:00] This is also an example of thinking about function, in this case cooling, rather than the default technology refrigeration. If you haven’t heard about this listen back to the Services Flip Insight episode for tools and resources.

Smart local solutions also seek to create local jobs. By its nature, distributed solar creates jobs in fact, distributed solar, such as rooftop and other small scale systems, accounts for two-thirds of all solar PV employment globally because residential and small commercial solar installations are more customised and create more demand for manual labour and in-person customer services.

In the case of the Yackandanda community, not only did they generate local installation and maintenance work, they also created jobs by starting their own energy retail business, Indigo Power

Social enterprise and local solutions

Social enterprise is a small, smart, local, and job-creating solution. In Wollongong, New South Wales, the social enterprise Green Connect is working to empower young people, refugees, and other disadvantaged minorities to enter into work that helps their community and the wider environment.

They’re tackling local needs locally, including waste reduction and avoidance through their zero waste and circular economy activities, along with sustainable local food production, running organic permaculture urban farm in their rural city,

Build local economies through nature regeneration

Sometimes it’s what you don’t have that’s the resource. Dark Sky communities are another initiative building local economies.

An increasingly recognised form of pollution in the 21st century is light pollution Regional communities from Winton in Outback Queensland to Bodmin Moor in Wales in the UK are joining the Dark Sky movement, a movement aimed at reducing light pollution. Carefully designed solutions for reducing light pollution turn out to create a whole range of benefits

Dark Sky communities create local economy benefits from increased tourism, reduced energy costs, and reduced bulb component costs for their municipalities. ‘ They use less energy because they use less light and more efficient lighting and nature-friendly light levels.

Dark Sky communities also provide better safety because properly shielded low glare warm-coloured lighting improves visibility for drivers and pedestrians, reducing accidents and their costs

[00:21:00] Dark sky initiatives also have environmental benefits because with shielded, lower glare, and time-limited lighting, they protect local nocturnal animals and aid the migration of night-traveling birds. Near beaches and waterways, they preserve the natural behavior of marine organisms, and globally, they reduce emissions by reducing light intensity and hours of use.

Dark Skies even help human health and well-being because they improve sleep rhythms and reduce health risks like sleep disorders and depression.

Understanding local needs, local resources, and local opportunities to create local benefits is a starting point for finding small, smart local solutions- rather than jumping to a so-called ” obvious” global commodity product.

Leverage local knowledge resources

Local knowledge resources are often a key element in small, smart, local solutions because it’s not just about materials and energy. A good example of this is the growing recognition of the power and value of Indigenous fire management practices.

Indigenous fire management wisdom is being recovered in different locations all around the world. There’s a good example in Central Australia, where local knowledge is being organized and spread across the center of the continent by the Indigenous Desert Alliance.

The Alliance have developed a Right Way Fire program, which combines cultural and Western ways of burning. This program is so useful that it’s been nominated as a finalist in the 2026 Earthshot Prize.

The Alliance coordinates a network of 70 ranger teams across Central Australia using indigenous knowledge of when to burn, in what weather, the knowledge and experience of local people handed down over tens of thousands of years. Their processes reduce fuel loads, improve native habitats, and lessen the risk of large destructive bushfires.

Their implementation process combines traditional yarning sessions and face-to-face cross-team visits with 21st century technology, including geographic information system mapping, online hubs, and video webinars

The value of local indigenous knowledge is being recognized globally. Studies from the World Resource Institute quantify the benefits ” Across the four countries combined, indigenous and community-managed lands lost just six percent of tree cover over the past two decades, compared with eleven percent in state-managed protected areas and eighteen percent in lands under other management”.

Small, smart local solutions recognise and value local wisdom. and they also leverage global know-how.

Global technology, locally selected and applied

[00:24:00] Global technology can be really powerful when it’s relevant and in local hands.

one example is the Fab Lab network founded by physicist Neil Gershenfeld at MIT in 2001 they are busy putting 3D fabrication technology into local hands around the world. Technology that’s used by locals for locals. The Fab Foundation is an open creative community of fabricators, artists, scientists, engineers, students, amateurs, and professionals.

Today, they’re located in more than 100 countries around the world, with around Fab Labs in different locations

Fab Labs are not pushing predetermined solutions. They just open their hubs to locals so they can make what’s needed or wanted locally. And they’ve been used to make everything from replacement parts for old washing machines to prosthetic limbs

As Neal Gershenfeld puts it, ” The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.

Think big, enable locally

Another group acting as a conduit between local needs, local wisdom, and global know-how is a small not-for-profit called Terrain Natural Resource Management In the wet tropics of Far North Queensland.

They’ve been operating since 2003, working in and with their local agricultural community on a wide range of projects

Small projects such as reducing stream bank erosion on the Herbert River and improving on-farm soil health. these small projects have big results because they reduce the outflow of sediment into the Great Barrier Reef catchment.

Terrain are proactive enablers of change, whose roles include providing extension support for soil health and regenerative farming improvements, training people in soil testing and water sampling, and helping with grant applications to fund improvement processes

Terrain don’t stop with their local environment. They also tick the local and global knowledge integration box, combining work with indigenous people and also bringing national and international experts into the region to teach

Terrain even work at an economic systems level. They’ve been instrumental in developing multiple biodiversity credit schemes, schemes that provide avenues for investment into wet tropics habitat restoration. These include the development of a reef credits program for funding evidence-based water quality improvements to the Great Barrier Reef catchment, and more recently, a cassowary credits program to enable investments in on-land tropical habitat restoration.

[00:27:00] Thinking small and smart isn’t all about technology, it’s also about effort. Indigenous fire management techniques were developed for use in bare feet using sticks and kangaroo skins.

Often it really is about thinking small and taking intentional, more long-term action consistently, which is a foundational systems thinking principle as well.

Small, smart, intentional, long-term actions can make a big difference

In the 1970s, two retired plant-loving Australian chemists – watched the failure of a large-scale , slash, rip, and burn weed control program in their neighbourhood, a program that actually ended up accelerating weed growth in the area to ” be improved”.

In reaction to the results of this “big effort, more weeds” approach, the elderly Bradley sisters came up with their own lower energy method for bush regeneration. One that could be done by small groups of local volunteers in small amounts of time, mostly using hand tools.

Now known as the Bradley Method of Bush Regeneration and documented in a much-respected handbook, Bringing Back the Bush, their work has gone on to anchor global movements such as Assisted Natural Regeneration and Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration.

Small can apply to technology choices

A small, smart local perspective highlights that like for like isn’t always the end game. Smaller may be more accessible.

Recently, there’s been a rush to EV adoption in order to reduce transport emissions, one that’s been accelerated by oil price hikes. it’s quite interesting to look at which EVs, because what the data is now showing is that small forms of , electric transport such as e-bikes and scooters are having a bigger global emissions impact than cars. This is particularly so in developing countries not as committed to large-scale automobile infrastructure.

Going forward, even in developed countries, it could well turn out that the need for car charging infrastructure is a bit less than expected and that a more targeted investment with extra community returns in health and fitness as well as emissions might be in more bike paths and secure bike storage instead.

You don’t necessarily need to go rural or developing world for small actions with big impacts. Variable speed electric motors are one example where you don’t need a big infrastructure expenditure to create savings and sustainability benefits.

Most people don’t realise that there are around 300 million electric motors operating in the world today. And only about 20% of those 300 million motors are equipped with a variable speed drive to increase their energy efficiency. They just go at the same speed regardless how much power is actually needed.

[00:30:00] If we added variable speed drives to the remaining 80% of those motors worldwide, it would save 10% of the electricity in the world. That’s a big number for a pretty small change.

Local implementation strategies from global experience

There are many forms of global know how that we can call on to implement local solutions implementation strategies, not technologies or knowledge bases. People who are interested in making the change they want to see in the world don’t have to start from scratch in the implementation process.

The last two decades has seen the development of multiple practical, accessible, bottom-up innovation approaches. these include resistance minimising implementation tools for consultation and inclusion, such as Doughnut Economics and Systems Thinking and Systemic Design, and they also include communications and influencing strategies- everything from the Psychology of Persuasion to the Diffusion of Innovation.

I’ve mentioned some of those tools in past insight episodes, and I’ll be covering them in more detail in the final two insights in this podcast series.

There are big benefits available from smart, small local solutions

There’s increasing recognition that designing smaller, smarter, more localised solutions is also great at creating local value.

This means that if you’re out for real impact, you aren’t limited to big push solutions and their side effects, which seems to be what most of the mainstream media covers most of the time.

Developing the skills to identify and implement smart, small local solutions is well worth considering because there are many, many ways to combine the global and the local to solve local challenges

The principles for doing this work more effectively have been developing over the last 20 to 30 years, and today there’s a range of toolkits and design approaches to help you get started. Some of these I’ve already covered in episodes on biomimicry and circular economy and the service flip, and there are further really useful implementation toolkits that I’ll cover in the final two insights episodes.

But the first step in finding those solutions isn’t some cool framework or some great library of solutions, although both of them are in the world today.

Don’t get trapped in top-down assumptions

The first step is to check in on your thinking and to identify any limiting assumption that you’ve been carrying about high tech, top-down push solutions delivered by big organisations, whether corporations or governments.

[00:33:00] There are a heap of relevant global solutions knowledge bases to leverage. You’ll learn to evaluate them for reliability and access.

As a source of solutions ideas for those who have done their homework and started with place, a great place to look is the Project Regeneration Action Nexus.

Last time I looked, this had around 90 practical, accessible action lists oriented towards individuals and communities and businesses and regions. It’s particularly relevant to this insight on smart, small local approaches.

Also, make sure that you look for your local circular economy hub, because circular economy isn’t just some think tank in Europe, it’s something that’s happening in regions around the world.

If you’re new to the term circular economy or had somehow concluded that circular economy has something to do with recycling, then check out the full scope of circular economy design developments and resources using online hubs such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and their Circular Design guide. Then look around your region.

One local example for me, is Bega Circular Valley a local Australian group taking a range of information from global resources and applying them locally to leverage local resources such as oyster shells

These previously unidentified valuable resources are used to mellow a local vodka. The alcohol-softened shells then feed local chooks, providing extra nutrition, and eventually enrich local soil with the chooks’ by-product.

This has been a podcast full of examples because my goal was to loosen up your thinking. There copious links in the show notes.

Fundamentally, this insight is about looking beyond big solutions delivered by big organizations and exploring for small, smart, local, regenerative information.

Savings and benefits multiply, so “small” doesn’t stay small

It’s important and impactful because – in the same way that wastes multiply- savings and benefits also multiply when you switch from extractive to regenerative design. Every smart, regenerative, local innovation multiplies the benefits of all the other surrounding efforts.

And even better, your individual small, smart, local innovation also demonstrates to the people around you that today’s solutions are open to everybody, so they don’t have to “use less and wait for the government”

Once you get past dis-empowering messages like ” reduce your consumption” and “lobby your local politicians”, there’s a broad range of positive opportunities. The key steps to include, in no particular order:

[00:36:00]

Explore the full spectrum of today’s solutions because they are inspiring.

Go beyond the few everybody knows default solutions in the mainstream and ask what else? And why?

Also, focus and filter based on your location because regeneration starts with place So be watching out for what would make your bit of the world better today.

And of course, look beyond shiny new “latest thing” clean tech solutions, at least to get started. It is easy to get distracted by cool new technologies. It’s really tempting to explore, the extremes of innovation in the hope of finding a magic bullet solution.

We already have hundreds of practical, accessible solutions. According to independent modeling, if we got with accelerating what already works, we could make a massive difference. We don’t need to wait. There are plenty of ways to accelerate what we already know works today, and a lot of that can be done locally.

Always keep in mind that the world’s inventors and early adopters have been delivering human systems change solutions as well as technology. And those solutions are practical and accessible . I’m going to talk more about human systems change in the final two Insights episodes.

Technology is an enabler, not the answer

The rise of global internet and social media and other technologies is increasing opportunities today. Opportunities to develop rewarding local solutions using global knowhow, local wisdom, local resources, and twenty-first century innovation delivery skills and tools to regenerate local communities and ecosystems

David Fleming, author of Lean Logic, describes our challenge well.

“Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions. They require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.”

If we want a better world our way, not somebody else’s, we don’t have to wait for big policy and corporations. There’s a much bigger game to play than simply campaigning for frugality and political action.

We have the technology

We can rebuild our local economies. what’s really needed to get started? Understanding, ambition, leadership, learning, creativity, community building, communication skills. Building a better world is about creating and making and collaborating.

With today’s rich and growing smorgasbord of commercial – solutions, it can also be about opportunity and fun and creativity. It can be about business innovation and career development and community building. If this sounds like a game you might want to play, then it’s time to find a way to get involved.

[00:39:00] The show notes have all the links I’ve referenced, and you can explore the earlier insights in this podcast series.

if you learn better through reading than listening, then go to the Think Act Regenerate website and sign up for the free insights email series.

if you want to get started faster with a bit of guidance, you might want to consider my Regenerative Thinking in Action program as a kickstarter.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Think Act Regenerate podcast. My name is Leigh Baker, and I’ve enjoyed being your host for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a like and a positive review on whatever platform you’re listening from.

There’s a world of regenerative solutions out there waiting for you to explore into reality.

So be excited. Be very excited