The creativity and innovation field is a rather smallish group of people. It feels like a community, I know most of my competitors, and, I wish them all the success in the world.

There are a few folks that have achieved nearly cult status within our community because of their unique achievements.  George Prince was surely one of them.  George was the co-inventor/enhancer of Synectics.  Synectics is one of the few comprehensive models for problem solving used in corporate innovation. Kimberly-Clarke was one of early, successful, users of the method.

If you don’t know it, I highly suggest that you read Prince’s “Synectics-The Practice of Creativity” (or his partners/co-developer’s book, “Synectics,” by William JJ Gordon, which Prince contributed to).  It’s out of print, but you can hunt down a copy.  Whenever I visit the home or office of a fellow innovation practitioner, I invariably see a worn copy of one of those books on the shelf. Synectics essentially uses the power of analogies and metaphors to re-frame problems, which leads to innovative solutions.  It’s a powerful creative thinking methodology, and as I understand, it was developed by using video observation of innovation teams.  Remarkable and visionary work in the 50’s and 60’s, and George Prince was at the heart of it.

Synectics tools can be integrated and/or adapted to work with other problem solving methods, like Osborn-Parnes CPS, which is something I do. I instruct folks on the use of CPS in my business novel, Jack’s Notebook.

SynecticsWorld is the company that continues to offer innovation solutions based on this method today.

I never met George but I have a lot of respect for the work he did. And, beyond all this serious innovation stuff, he clearly had a whimsical mind.  See his doodles — I love these! George passed away earlier this week. God rest his creative soul.