This week I started a course in Sustainability Management in Enterprises with Alexandra Lichtenberg. She’s an architect and urban planner also with degrees in marketing and corporate finance. She worked for many years in the business area, mainly in the marketing and strategic planning fields and has a masters on Strategic Planning for Sustainability at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. She designed the first Ecohouse in Brazil to be monitored and its results publicly disclosed.

So far I only had one class, and it was amazing. This woman is terrific. I’ll post here some of the things she brings to class. And this is the very first one.

Have you ever heard anything about Biomimicry? Well, till this past monday, I haven’t. Biomimicry is nothing more, nothing less than the study and observation of nature’s best ideas and characteristics in order to imitate it’s designs and processes to solve human problems and improve our technology in order to have better and more efficient results.

Alexandra showed us a video of it from TED Talks. TED is a small nonprofit conference devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading about Technology, Entertainment and Design. It started in 1984 and the very first one was in San Francisco, California. They believe in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and the world. That’s why they built a clearinghouse to offer free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers. They have many different actions with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize. You can read and watch the videos about it on their website.

Take a look at this video to find out a little bit about this amazing new way of seeing the world.

The woman talking here is Janine Benyus, a science writer, innovation consultant and conservationist.