Thinking in New Boxes

CareerCast - Life-long Career Development

Alan InyEveryone has an opinion about innovation and creativity. Some people believe you need to think outside the box. Others think real breakthroughs occur thinking inside the box. While Alan Iny, a senior specialist in creativity and scenarios at the Boston Consulting Group and author of Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity doesn’t reject either approach, he believes they are complete for today’s rapidly changing world. In this CareerCast, Iny will share how to identify the optimal set of boxes for growth and innovation in your job, venture, and career.

Aired June 15, 2018

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Alan Iny has the pleasure of spending his entire working life on creativity in the business world. As the senior global specialist for creativity and scenarios at the Boston Consulting Group, he has trained thousands of executives and BCG consultants on how to think creatively, and regularly runs a wide range of trainings and workshops across industries and around the world. He is a member of the firm's strategy management team, with vast experience advising companies worldwide in innovation, scenarios, transformation, organization design, and change management across industries. 

Among his recent engagements are multiple recent projects for the World Economic Forum, facilitation of workshops for Executive Leadership Teams of many household brands focused on developing creative views of the future, live development of scenarios for the future of a coal mine over two days in the wilderness of Botswana, and a series of workshops in Washington focused on "breaking constraints." He also has recently run "ideation weeks" for leading beauty retailers, creative exercises for several banks and pharmaceutical companies, scenario planning exercises for an airline and several utilities, and strategic vision projects for companies ranging from cement to oncology.

In 2013, Iny launched Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity, written with Luc de Brabandere, and published by Random House, which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called "a must-read for anyone in a leadership position who dares to look at the world in new ways". It is now available in eleven languages. His speaking engagements range from a recent TED talk to the HSM Innovation Forum in Brazil, alongside Daniel Pink and Chip Heath and others, and workshops and presentations booked around the world and across the United States. His writing has also appeared in various academic journals, including Strategy & Leadership and Technological Forecasting & Social Change. 

Thinking in New Boxes

Read an excerpt of Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity by Luc De Brabandere and Alan Iny.

Read the Excerpt