Alex Faickney Osborn

Alex Faickney Osborn ( born May 24, 1888 in New York; † May 4, 1966 ) was an American author and is considered the inventor of brainstorming.

Life

In 1909, Osborn made ​​the bachelor's degree in philosophy, only during their occupation in the advertising industry, the 1921 Masters at the University Hamilton, USA, where he later ( until 1939 ) also taught himself. He was then allegedly lecturer at Cambridge Philosophy Institute in the United Kingdom. One of his students is Charles Hutchison Clark. In the meantime, he worked as a reporter for the Buffalo News.

In 1919 he founded together with Bruce Barton and Roy Durstine the advertising firm BDO, which has been called since the union with the Batten Co. in 1928 BBDO. After Durstine Osborn took over in 1939, the management of the company, which he gave in 1946 at Barton.

In 1954, Osborn, the " Creative Education Foundation " and installed the first institute for creative problem-solving at the University of Buffalo.

Already since 1919, active in the American advertising industry, Osborn found over the years that working meetings curb the creativity of the employees rather than promote. He developed four rules, a procedure that should the employees create the freedom for new ideas. In the shorter German translations of these rules were:

  • Practice no criticism!
  • The more ideas, the better!
  • Complement and improve already existing ideas!
  • The more unusual the idea, the better!

From Osborn comes the Osborn method or reversal method for business and personal problems:

  • What can I still use it? Can I use it differently?
  • Does the problem go to other ideas? Is there something else similar?
  • What can be changed? Which properties can be remodel?
  • Is it possible to zoom in a bit, add, multiply?
  • Is it possible to shrink a little, take away, shorten?
  • What can be replaced? What conditions can be changed?
  • Can the order or structure be changed?
  • Can the idea be turned into its opposite? Can the process be reversed?
  • Can combine ideas or people are connected?

A detailed list of questions is known as Osborn checklist, it leads based on these questions - about distributed on cards and drawn at random - by different aspects of the problem analysis.

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