From Reading to Practice: Regenerative Innovation Labs
Moving from understanding regenerative business to building regenerative metabolism
Over the past months, we’ve explored regenerative businesses across industries - from Heirloom Coffee supporting co-ops who transform Honduran soil to Beneficial State Bank redesigning capital flows. We’ve examined the covenant that exists between preservation and restoration, mapped the paradox of regenerative products within extractive business models, and traced how regeneration moves from food systems to everything else.
But still.. there’s a gap between our understanding of regeneration and actually practicing it, between mapping businesses and metabolizing new patterns, between having ‘followers’ and building participants.
It’s time to close that gap.
The Difference Between Business Models and Regenerative Metabolism
Most innovation work focuses on business models: How do you make money? What’s your value proposition? How do you scale?
These may be important questions. But they’re not regenerative questions.
Creating regenerative metabolisms forces us to ask something deeper: How does your business behave as a living system? What does it feed, and what feeds it? Does it extract from relationships or build them? Does it hoard knowledge or share it as commons?
Take MycoWorks. They raised $225 million for mushroom leather that outperforms animal hides, and it’s a genuinely regenerative material. But the business? It still runs on venture capital demanding 10x exits, centralized production, and proprietary IP that prevents collective learning.
Regenerative product with an extractive metabolism.
This gap - which I explored in detail in The Billion Dollar Mushroom Question - shows up everywhere:
Coffee companies source regeneratively but pay farmers through commodity pricing
Fashion brands use natural fibers but operate on fast-fashion cycles
Banks finance solar but optimize for quarterly returns over ecosystem health
Business model innovation asks: Can this make money?
Metabolic innovation asks: Can this make life?
What Carom Actually Does
We don’t help you build better business models.
We help you evolve your regenerative metabolism.
That means examining how your business behaves across our six planetary dimensions:
Habitat & Living Systems: Are you protecting or depleting the ecosystems you depend on?
Food, Water & Nutrient Cycles: Do your outputs become inputs elsewhere, or do they become waste?
Climate & Energy Balance: Are you burning through resources or designing for renewal?
Biodiversity, Health & Resilience: Are you optimizing for monoculture efficiency or diverse resilience?
Knowledge, Innovation & Evolution: Are you hoarding insights as competitive advantage or sharing them as commons?
Kinship & Culture: Do you see your supply chain as transactions or relationships?
Most businesses might excel in one or two dimensions while extracting in others. Regenerative metabolism means designing coherence across all six so the way you operate mirrors the living systems you claim to protect.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about practice and direction.
The Practice Field: Regenerative Innovation Labs
Understanding these dimensions is step one. Applying them is where transformation happens.
That’s why we’re launching Regenerative Innovation Labs. These are intensive, small-group workshops where practitioners don’t just learn the framework, they use it to map their own work, identify their “overfishing problems,” and practice holding paradox without forcing resolution.
These aren’t lectures. They’re practice fields.
You’ll work through the Canvas with guidance, map your business across the planetary dimensions, and connect with others doing the same work. You’ll leave with:
Your business mapped through one dimension (with clarity on where you’re extracting vs regenerating)
Your specific “overfishing problem” identified
Practices for evolving metabolism, not just tweaking models
Connection to practitioners facing similar tensions
Why ‘Labs’?
I’m calling these workshops “Labs” because they function like practice laboratories. They’re not physical spaces, but rather containers for experimentation.
Labs are where you test hypotheses, observe what emerges, and iterate based on what you learn. That’s exactly what we’re doing together: practicing regenerative metabolism in a safe container where it’s okay to not have the answers.
Courses teach you what to think. Labs teach you how to practice.
Regenerative metabolism can’t be taught through content consumption. It emerges through:
Sensing what’s actually happening in your system
Translating that into regenerative language
Seeding small experiments in behavior change
Regenerating the patterns that create life
Evolving as the system teaches you
This is our Regenerative Cycle, and it requires more than understanding – it demands we practice.
That’s the difference between having ‘followers’ and building participants.
Followers consume content; meanwhile participants co-create practice.
So the Regenerative Innovation Community isn’t about me publishing more. It’s about us learning how to behave regeneratively together in our businesses, our relationships, our decisions.
The First Lab: Starting Local
We’re starting where we are, in the Bay Area with people I can gather in person.
When: In the next few weeks (exact date based on who can gather – interested? Email us)
Where: Bay Area location (confirming based on responses)
Who: 8-15 practitioners working in or adjacent to regenerative businesses
What: 2 hours mapping your work through the Regenerative Innovation Canvas
This will be intimate by design. Small enough for real conversation. Local enough to build relationships that continue beyond the workshop.
Can’t make it in person? We’re offering a limited number of virtual seats for those outside the Bay Area who want to participate remotely. But the primary experience is designed for the people in the room.
Investment:
Free for founding members of the Regenerative Innovation Community ($120/year—locked in forever for first 50 members)
$35 for others (in-person)
$25 for virtual (limited spots)
Founding members get free access to all future Labs plus the Expanded Canvas, monthly case studies, and practitioner community. If you’re planning to attend multiple sessions, membership pays for itself immediately.
This is a pilot, an experiment in what regenerative practice looks like when we gather.
[Bay Area and interested? Let us know here]
Not a founding member yet? Join now to get free access to this Lab and all future sessions—plus immediate access to the Expanded Canvas and deep-dive case studies.
What Comes After
This first Lab is an experiment in three things:
1. Moving from content to practice
The workshops become spaces where regenerative metabolism is practiced, not just discussed.
2. Building participant community
The people in the room (physical or virtual) become nodes in a living network and not just an audience, but instead collaborators.
3. Demonstrating Carom’s approach
We don’t consult on your business model. We help you sense, translate, and evolve your metabolism. The Labs show what that looks like.
Over the coming months, we’ll open more Labs. Some will be in-person, some virtual, some in partnership with people who understand regeneration through different lenses.
But it starts here. With the people willing to move from reading to practicing.
A Question for You
Before you decide whether to join the first Lab, sit with this:
What’s your overfishing problem?
Every industry has its version and it’s the pattern we explored in From Plate to Planet. It’s the supply chain you won’t trace, the extraction everyone accepts as normal, the growth model that requires depletion, the efficiency that destroys resilience.
Every business has at least one but most never name them.
Regenerative metabolism begins when you’re willing to look directly at where your system extracts - even when (especially when!) that extraction is baked into your business model’s success.
That’s the work. That’s the practice.
And it’s uncomfortable.
But so is watching the systems we depend on collapse while we optimize their extraction.
Join Us
If you’re ready to move from understanding regeneration to practicing it and from building business models to evolving metabolism, this is your invitation.
[Are you interested in the first Lab? Contact us here]
Tell us if you’re local to the Bay Area or would like to join virtually. We’ll confirm details this week based on who’s gathering.
And if you’re not ready for the Lab but want to stay connected to this work, join the Regenerative Innovation Community. You’ll continue getting weekly insights on businesses proving regeneration works and you’ll be first to know when future Labs open.
Every business can ask these questions. The difference is between those who do, and those who practice toward the answers.
The Regenerative Innovation Labs are opening. The question is: are you willing to look at your metabolism, not just your model?