Works
- Your Creative Power, 1948
- Applied Imagination, 1953
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A co-founder of the advertising agency BBDO who named brainstorming (in How to Think Up, 1942) and gave it four rules: go for quantity, withhold criticism, welcome wild ideas, and combine and improve ideas. Applied Imagination, with its checklist of idea-spurring questions, became the basis of the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving process.
Caveat: Studies of group brainstorming, reviewed by Diehl and Stroebe in 1987, found that interacting groups produce fewer ideas than the same number of people working alone.