A chapter from the HEA's publication Enhancing education for sustainable development in Business and Management Hospitality Leisure Marketing Tourism.
This chapter focuses on an educational experience that develops understanding of the role of higher level thinking specifically the establishment of innovative thought patterns that arise from a visual and kinaesthetic interpretation of business product innovation. (The four classical learning styles - visual aural read/write and kinaesthetic – are abbreviated to VARK (Walsh et al 2011)). These patterns of thought are developed to a high level to establish the existence of a more sustainable industrial ecology in the global marketplace initially using an experiential exploration of real products found in the marketplace. The chapter then locates the significance of pattern detection in the practical and theoretical work of Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch (TRIZ Altshuller 1997). TRIZ is Russian for ‘problem-solving analysis and forecasting tool’ and has been created by the study of hundreds of thousands of global patents to discover patterns and similarities. Another very interesting development in invention and innovation is Biomimicry which uses nature’s 3.8 billion years of research and development to solve problems (Benyus 1997).
