Living nature offers plenty of ‘inventions’ that could serve as prototypes for new technical products. It is the task of biomimetics to abstract these ideas from nature and to implement them technically. But how exactly does that work? And can biomimetics be considered an independent scientific discipline? A new research project at the universities of Rostock and Tübingen is investigating these questions. It is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with around 500,000 euros.