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2012 V&R Participant- Dr. Dengjian Jin

Dr. Dengjian Jin, International Business and Management

Creativity, Knowledge Evolution, and Innovation for Sustainability

My purpose for participating the Valley & Ridge Workshop is to revise my current INBM 300- Creativity, Innovation, and Knowledge Management to incorporate a sustainability component. The result is the attached new course titled INBM 300 Creativity, Knowledge Evolution, and Innovation for Sustainability, hopefully as a sustainability connection course.

Before attending the workshop, I already had some training and research experiences in sustainable development. Yet, I still learned a lot from the workshop, especially with regard to the biology, ecology, geology of sustainability and Dickinson’s community-based efforts for achieving sustainability. During the workshop, I also found that many of the ideas and practices discussed, such as service learning, community-based learning, and placed-based experimental learning are intimately linked with my current teaching and research interests. I have already incorporated articles about spatial learning or regional learning infrastructure as required readings in my Creativity and Innovation course; and my finished book manuscript, the Origins of Knowledge, has already incorporated the link between climate change and the historical evolution of knowledge. Valley & Ridge Workshop has motivated me to make a dramatic revision of my current offering of INBM 300.

In addition to its traditional focus on creativity, innovation, and knowledge evolution, the redesigned course will also lead students to link climate change with the evolution of the human mind, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the historical evolution of knowledge; to understand why it was only after the Industrial Revolution that our own species acquired an ability to cause global warming; to investigate the innovation of technologies for sustainable development; and to write a research paper on related issues.