Martin H. Bremer and Eduardo Gonzalez
Center for Environmental Quality, ITESM, 64849 Monterrey, Me ́xico
E-mail: mbremer@ itesm.mx, egm@itesm.mx

Emilio Mercado
Centro de Innovation en disen ̃o y tecnologia (CIDyT), ITESM, 64849 Monterrey, Me ́xico
E-mail: A00800651@itesm.mx

Abstract:
Undergraduate and graduate students are often exposed to definitions and lectures about creativity and innovation to accomplish some internal or external requirements about the syllabus and curricula, but they have little opportunity to do and experiment the creative processes and create innovative products and services.
The teaching philosophy at Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superioress de Montererry (ITESM) is focused in active a learning methodology which gives students an opportunity to learn by doing hands-on-projects with different goals. This opportunity has been used to do projects that face real problems but defining the problems using sustainability issues as part of the problem definition and to address solutions that are better than using just economical or technical goals.
There are many of challenges and even more possible forms of failure while trying to implement active learning in an creative and innovative way in the framework of sustainability, because it depends in the student, the problem setting, the availability of needed resources and that the teacher states the problem properly, has the flexibility to handle unexpected situations as well as results that are either negative or not the original ones, but that should not affect the grades of the student if he accomplished the learning goals.