1

On Gunter Pauli’s Strategic Business

Model of the Blue Economy
Thierry De Mees

e-mail: thierrydemees @ telenet.be

Prof. Gunter Pauli’s statement “10 years, 100 innovations, 100 million jobs” is not an appeal to the govern-
ments, but to each of us. His methodology and strategy for designing business models based upon his Blue Econo-
my paradigm is discussed here. When comparing this model to the classic problem solving models, we find a po-
tential for an exponential improvement of strategic successes. The amazing rules that makes this model work are
further analyzed.

Keywords: Blue Economy, Gunter Pauli, business model, business strategy.

1. Gunter Pauli’s Blue Economy
Pauli’s book “Blue Economy, 10 years, 100 innovations, 100
million jobs”, based upon the idea of a sustainable green
economy, is a bestseller.
The Blue Economy is a comprehensive model and business
concept that was founded by Gunter Pauli and that is conti-
nuously inspirited by himself and by hundreds of trained col-
leagues.
Like the term suggests, the Blue Economy supports the values
contained in ecology, often named “green” ideology in politics,
but goes far beyond it by connecting and merging this ideology
to the business profit and so, and thus guarantees the sustainabil-
ity of our economy in a way that it is not forbidden to consume.
This means that the Blue Economy is not known as a defen-
sive system against the excessive exploitation of our resources,
nor as a central regulating organism, nor as a cost-ineffective
substitution system of nature-incriminating processes, imposed
by the authorities or by lobbies.
Instead, it is known as a legacy that innovates the existing
business models and allows the reorientation of existing cash
flows and unused assets in the economy in an auto-regulating
way, while it performs durability of the resources and energy
and sustains the ecology systems. Moreover, the creation of these
cash flows is within everyone's reach.
Blue Economy business models are mainly driven by innova-
tions, but that doesn’t necessary mean high tech. The ingenuity
of knowledge ‘hidden’ in Earth’s nature is the greatest source of
inspiration.
In this paper, we will discuss Gunter Pauli’s Blue Economy
method, “Case 100”, to create new business models. It appears to
be an amazing methodology to generate cash flows.
The methodology and the study that follows is based upon a
three-day workshop, given by Prof. Gunter Pauli in Belgium on
December 6, 7 and 8, 2012 at the GreenVille site.
Gunter Pauli considers his Blue Economy as open source, so,
this information is a public property.
2. General principles
We need to find some opportunities for the creation of new
business, cash flows and jobs. There are two points of view: the
first is a general principle, the second a cyclical tactic.
1) Abundance principle
The aim of humanity is that the abundance which some of us
own, would become commons. The best way to obtain this is by
augmenting the global assets.
Which assets do we need to augment? Firstly, the basic needs
of humans: clean water, clean air, clean food, energy, resources,
health, employment, housing...
2) Crisis approach
In times of crisis, we have to win back the lost assets. The
current crisis made 50 million jobs in developing countries
disappear. The Blue Economy uses the technique of reallocation
of the lost assets.

1
3. Setting-up a Blue Economy business model
Prof. Pauli first starts from a target, the problem, through a
“pain analysis”. Then, he applies his technique “Scan, screen, and
implement”. The pain analysis and these three phases are briefly
explained below.
3.1. The pain analysis: where does it hurt?
In order to find business potential, the first step is to identify
unhealthy business situations. In these situations the willingness
to listen and change is likely to be high. Thus, the method to find
business potential is to determine where it hurts. Because when it
hurts, there probably is a will to remove that pain (and to pay for
it). Generally it hurts where the losses accumulate.
Such situations may be indicated by financial losses or large
companies closing down production units, leading to unem-
ployment and a deteriorating local economy. Another indicator is
the abundant presence of waste at the end of a process. Like in
nature, Blue Economy considers that the waste of a process is
potentially a nutrient for another process. A typical Blue
Economy example is the puddle of coffee from large cafe and
restaurant chains. There can be the preparedness to provide you
the funds of these costs, if you come with an attractive plan. And
when collected, this coffee ground could provide a perfect and
free resource to generate additional revenue.
3.2. Phase 1 : the Scan: the clustering of problems.
In classic problem solving, the first thing we do is to analyze
the problem and to solve the problem or to look for opportuni-
ties. Here, we don’t. We only open the case by putting other
problems (“pains”) next to it.
Example: The problem is manure.
Opening this problem with other problems and pains gives:
Income Energy Meat
waste
Building
Agriculture Manure
materials
Odor
Transport
Nutrition Insulation
And so on… The list is far from complete.
The other problems can be related to it or preferably, out of
the box.
Then, connections between the problems have to be made. A
few are drawn below:
It is clear that in comparison with classic problem solving, the
probability of opportunities increases dramatically.
If one uses a multidisciplinary team of people to scan the
problem, the problem list as well as the number of possible con-
nections will increase.
One discovery that resulted from such a screening was that
coffee ground are not manure but substrate for mushrooms. Cof-
fee ground consists of about 2000 different molecules whereof
some have coloring properties and some even have deodorant
properties, which can be integrated in sports clothing.
Another example is the pain “overfishing”. Here, we also
added, besides typical problems and pains, typical needs, which
can be seen as “soft pains”. The reader will immediately find
some connections.
Omega 3 Energy
Overfishing
Nutrition Fuel
Transport
Freshness Taste
Shipyards
The result of this “pain chart” is further discussed in this pa-
per.
Each of the connections is a potential for cash flow. The more
out-of-the-box the problems and the needs are, the more is the
probability for cash flow. While classic and vertical problem solv-
ing reaches a 1 to 1 probability of cash flow, and sometimes
create new problems, the new method allows to combine many
of them. The more open the multidisciplinary team of people
(techniques, finance, law, biology, etc), the higher the probability
for out-of-the-box thinking and for successful screening and im-
plementing.
A third example: the problem is the closing of an automobile
factory in an affected region, where a glass bulb factory has
difficulties and where too ineffective coalmines were closed, but
where lots of white sand are available. Some connections are
shown below.
Automobile Glass bulbs Mining
Glass supply Energy

Income Energy Meat Insulation

waste supply Housing
Building 12 V DC
Agriculture Manure materials supply
Transport Odor The connections here suggest a possible use of 12 Volt DC
Nutrition Insulation technology in houses, thus avoiding electrocution risks. Glass can
be used for housing material. Heat can be extracted from coal
mines, and so on.
2
 RULES:
1) Define the main pain.
2) Create a multidisciplinary team.
3) Extend to other pains, whether or not directly connected.
4) Cluster and integrate pains together.
3.3. Phase 2 : the Screening: identifying the cash flows.
When the first problem, the pain, has been extended to a sys-
tem of pains and needs, it is time to put the multidisciplinary
team on the assignment of a detailed screening of possible oppor-
tunities of cash flows. The key is mostly technology, but not al-
ways high tech. The Blue Economy also looks at the animal
world and at nature. How does it happen there?
Other kinds of opportunities are found, in the case of sectors
and businesses in crisis, by reallocating the production to another
sector than the original. It is possible to manufacture glass foam
as a construction material, extract heat and methane from
inactive coal mines, provide houses with safe DC current,
avoiding so electrocution and so on.
Don’t necessarily think big, small and multiple is better. The
chances of success come from the local business community, with
short delivery times, and prevent unnecessary transport.
Don’t create the waves, but surf on the waves. In other
words, use what you get right there, in your region, at your
immediate reach.
RULES:
1) Define multiple cash flows.
2) Make business shifts to other sectors.
3) Make small, clustered projects.
4) Use what you have; don’t create new uncertainties.
5) Think and act local so you can deliver fast.
6) Check the feasibility on the short, medium and long
term.
3.4. Phase 3 : Implement: the Financial Plan.
A decreasing profit due to competition, or due to a crisis,
causes high risks to the stake holders and the bankers. And the
ones who are feeling the pain are the bankers who will soon have
to write-off the costs of a company having difficulties.
So, the business partner can be the banker of the credit com-
mittee, because the banker needs his bonus to be safeguarded.
When you are able to change the business sector of the
problem business, you can strongly reduce the risks, and create
stable new cash flows.
Other sources of financing through the local authorities are to
cash the CO2-neutrality of your project, the added value, the
creation of jobs, and avoiding delocalization.
The best partners, having lack of ideas or of future vision,
and willing to change their policy, are the family businesses.
Other financing can be found by cashing the costs of burning
or liquidating the waste of processes, by transforming the waste
3
into new raw materials. Coffee-grounds must not be incinerated
but can be reused as manure for mushrooms.
It is even possible to get cash out of branding the waste.
Starbucks in Spain makes publicity for their choice of depositing
their coffee-grounds to the mushroom agriculture.
Taking all these arguments together, it will not even need to
have a business plan to build.
It is always better to not get all the protagonists gathered for
a contract, because some of them can be suspicious, influenced,
and so on. One sole member can turn the project down. Some
will say: “I will only go for it if the others do too”. Then, it is
useful to get conditional commitments from all the individual
participants: the problem company, the banker, the supplier, the
customers of new cash flows, and the multidisciplinary team you
are working in. Therefore, you can make a conditional contract
between the team and each of the protagonists, which states that
the signatory agrees with the project if all of the other partners
will sign their conditional contract. When all the contracts are put
together, you get a contract for the whole group of protagonists.
Do you need to be a millionaire to implement such a concept?
Not at all! Don’t buy the cripple business nor demand to get the
money flows through your bank account. Just get strongly
involved. At least, you can show the success of your participation
in your records. And maybe someone will propose you to stay a
few years to help running one or more of the new cash flows.
Another very important thing is to not go public and to stay
invisible as long as possible for new strategies and
implementations: your plans, how positive they might be, will
always disturb some others, which are powerful enough to
destroy them.
RULES:
1) Find responsible protagonists with a pain, for recovering
the existing costs (waste).
2) Find responsible protagonists with pain (bankers), for
(re)financing. Argue on the risk-lowering by the multiple
cash flows and the shift of sector.
3) If applicable, find responsible authorities with budgets
that are already approved.
4) Don’t let the money go through your bank account.
5) Choose preferably family businesses to get involved in.
6) Try the branding of new cash flows.
7) Stay invisible.
4. Results of the Blue Economy
There are more than 180 innovations up to now that have
been gathered by Gunter Pauli and that are typical examples of
the Blue Economy. Probably, much more unknown projects exist.
For example, the topic of overfishing resulted in the invention
of a modern catamaran with rigid sails and dual-function water-
and photovoltaic cells that generate electricity and hot water,
which is propelled without fuel, and captures fish without nets,
the same way as whales and dolphins hunt the fish shoals.
The catamaran makes circles and releases air bubbles out of a
large vertically immerged ring that confines the fish and make
them rise upwards, except the larger ones that can escape, so that
procreation still continues. This new fishing boat keeps the fish
alive and asleep at low temperature, due to the cooling capacity
of the circulating water in the dual-function water- and
photovoltaic cells at night (reaching as low temperatures as 6°C
or 43°F). After the fishing, but still on the ship, the fish fillets are
made, the heads crushed for the extraction of omega 3, some fish
smoked, and the bones processed. If only 2/3th of the waters is
fished in, sufficient fish remains to ensure sustainable fishing,
forever.
Fig.1: Blue Economy example: CO2 emission-free Maréthix sardine
fisher, 24 m x 12 m, that produces more energy than it consumes, and
that ensures sustainable fishing of shoal fish.
5. Discussion and conclusion
The concepts of the Gunter Pauli’s Blue Economy and its
strategies have some major global advantages:
- The aim of sharing the abundance by lowering the pric-
es, creating innovations, and jobs, to change basic needs
into commons;
- The aim of making a chain of ecosystems without waste;
- The chance to involve all citizens;
- To create new and multiple niches and cash flows;
- To give preference to what is locally available: the
money, the people, the waste, the factories.
The levers that are created by Pauli’s practical strategy to set
up a business model, are the exponential increase of the chances
of success by :
- The use of the working method of the “pains” to detect
opportunities;
- The deployment of self-organizing multidisciplinary
groups;
- The lowering of risk through the search for multiple cash
flows and a shift of sector;
- The use of existing resources: financing (costs of waste,
avoiding bankruptcy, etc), HR, production, raw
materials and waste;
It has already been stated in Pauli’s book that these concepts
are able to change the rules of the game and come to a new ma-
cro-economic order, by avoiding the ever-lasting private debt
culture and the auto-destroying competition, by avoiding the
chastening green politics, but instead by opening new business
niches and by engaging the entrepreneurship of all the citizens,
including the unemployed and the pensioners.
I cannot but promote this ideology and this strategy for
setting up business models, certainly from the theoretical point of
view, but also from the multitude of examples that have been
realized till now. Of course, the spreading of the ideas and me-
thodology is of utmost importance in order to start changing
globally.
Everyone must be aware that he or she is potentially a Blue
Economy entrepreneur who can set up a multidisciplinary group
to not only eradicate pains by rethinking processes, but also to
generate new employment and new profits.
References
[1] Pauli G., "The Blue Economy", Paradigm Publications, USA, ISBN
978-0-912111-90-2 (2010).
[2] Case 100 of the innovations at :
http://www.theblueeconomy.org/blue/Innovations.html
[3] http://www.gunterpauli.com
[4] http://www.zeri.org
[5] http://www.clubofrome.org