Within our research at Becoming Regenerative (B-Regen), we’ve found that no venture can be “fully regenerative” on its own, as regeneration requires whole-system change. Yet most startups operate within supply chains, capital markets, and regulatory environments optimised for speed, scale, and extraction. 

We see the value in field sites for the future as places where alternative arrangements can be prefigured: where new economic, social, and ecological models can be prototyped in more contained settings. Crucially, these sites sit alongside the present and can make visible the frictions between regenerative futures and today’s extractive systems.

The experiential aspect of these sites is key. Many of the ventures we engaged with expressed the importance of experiential learning to bring the public and others on board with regenerative futures. They took brands on field trips to regenerative pastures, hosted community workshops to create bioreceptive containers for tidal restoration, or situated their manufacturing and workshops within regenerative campuses. Here, corporates, students, policymakers, and community members witnessed and participated in regenerative practices as they unfolded. Around the world, comparable structures, sometimes emerging from academic institutions, sometimes from grassroots networks or entrepreneurial ecosystems, are taking shape. We see field sites for the future as intentionally connecting and strengthening this growing movement by creating shared infrastructures for experimentation, collective learning, and the cultivation of regenerative capabilities.

We see clear benefits in place-based innovation and thinking. What if ventures developed a stronger connection to the ecologies and communities they depend upon? What if investment, governance, and production were embedded in specific landscapes, making responsibility and reciprocity visible and material? Field sites for the future invite ideas to be rooted in places as much as markets, grounding innovation within living systems, and enabling systemic change to emerge from situated, shared practice.