Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

It’s a fit: Creative-conference promotion gets Brand management

Stephen Brand believes in creativity. And what he believes about it  is that there’s little good in having an idea if you don’t do anything with it.

  Brand has found a place to work that’s all about both getting ideas and putting them to work. The first president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio – who also served as  Fellow" href="http://www.magnetwork.org/competitiveness/ia_08_stephen_brand.htm">Innovation Fellow at NorTech, Cleveland’s technology-based, economic-development association,  and earned an executive doctorate from Case Western Reserve University by studying the early childhood influences of successful inventors – has landed at the Creative Education Foundation in Amherst, Mass. 

CEF specializes in helping people learn creative and effective problem-solving techniques. As the foundation website explains, “Every day principles fostered by CEF programs are helping someone, somewhere in the world develop new products, make business operations run more profitably, restructure organization and agencies to become more effective and less encumbered, reinvigorate economies, make improvements in our schools, revitalize communities and replace ineffective methods and systems with new, more workable ones.”

Through the Journal of Creative Behavior, which it publishes; a youth-outreach program; awards (“Creative Class”  economic-development guru Richard Florida won CEF’s 2005 Sid Parnes Pioneer Award); and the annual International Creative Problem-Solving Institute, CEF has been trying to get people to innovate since the 1950s.  

Brand, who recently moved to western Massachussetts, was out driving one day about a year ago when he saw the CEF sign and thought to himself that he ought to be working there, he said. He’s currently helping the foundation promote its next CPSI conference, called the Revolution of Creativity, in Boston this coming June. And it sounds like man was matched to task by some Heavenly Headhunter, because CEF teaches what Brand has been practicing for years. 

Creative problem-solving is not so much like the flashes of inspiration that lead geniuses to make great art, he noted, as like a means of organizing your ideas, and following a process of deductive reasoning to a solution.  With regular mortals, Brand said, “All you need to do is lead them through a journey from A to B to Z.”

But  imagination is required and Brand thinks the times have never been better for putting it to use. Instead of being worried by the recession, he said, “I’m excited about it. This is a great opportunity for innovators.”

He also thinks it’s vital for businesses - nonprofit and for-profit alike – to keep innovating.  (“The traditional nonprofit model will not work into the future. Period.”) But most do it only when times are bad and their companies are in crisis. Instead,  they have to innovate even – and maybe especially – when times are good.

“They’re crazy to be happy when things are fine,” he said, pointing out that Starbucks, for instance, rested on its laurels and look what happened: Competitors such as McDonald’s got smart, took away customers who wanted fancy coffee without the groovy sit-down-coffeeshop experience and high prices, and by the time Starbucks woke up and smelled the,  er, you know, it had lost so much business, it had to close 600 stores. 

Education is crucial. “We have to teach the next generation of innovators and problem-solvers” instead of just training young people for assembly lines, Brand said.

That’s where CEF tries to help. And how exactly does it teach these skills? Stay tuned.