Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

Marketing executives and frustrated industrial designers will enjoy this expanded version of marketing professors Boyd and Goldenberg’s engaging corporate presentation on “Systematic Inventive Thinking” (SIT): a set of problem-solving techniques that help companies “make creativity part of their cultures.” There are intriguing ideas in this hybrid work, which reads like a business school case study and history of industrial design innovations like the minimalist DVD player or the iPod Shuffle. While the authors use systemic approaches to find unexpected answers, their conflation of creativity with cleverness betrays the faintly grandiose promise of systematizing creativity—a process intended to improve efficiency and yield dramatic, and profitable, variations on product themes. Boyd and Goldenberg’s definition of innovation is loose enough to allow them to lionize the 30-minute delivery guarantee of Domino’s Pizza, while they fail to see that reorganizing surgical device instruction techniques for the sake of increased efficiency is hardly inventive. Agent: Jim Levine, the Levine Greenberg Agency. (June)