UC Marketing Professor Publishes Guide to Innovative Thinking

Drew Boyd, executive director of the Carl H. Lindner College of Business Master of Science in Marketing Program and assistant professor-educator of marketing and innovation, co-authored a book that inspires a new approach to creative thinking.

“Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results,” with Jacob Goldberg, professor of marketing at the School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting professor at Columbia Business School and the Interdisciplinary Center-Herzliya (IDC), was published in June 2013 by Simon & Schuster.

The book — featured in the Wall Street Journal on June 14, 2013 — instructs innovators to forget brainstorming. Instead, the authors offer a practical guide to innovation that emphasizes working within the constraints of what they already know.  In short, innovation is a skill that can be taught rather than being a gift one is born with. The book offers five “templates” and two guiding principles that can be learned and mastered by anyone to set the creative wheels in motion.

Boyd says that like other skills, the more you practice, the better you'll be. “In this book, we want to raise the curtain and reveal a fascinating world that hides right in front of you – inside the proverbial box.”

From decades of research and real-world experience, the authors share principles and techniques to spur creative thinking and take a counter-intuitive approach of thinking inside familiar frameworks that can be formed into templates to channel the process that makes us more creative.

Boyd, along with Jim Tappel, assistant professor-educator at UC College of Engineering and Applied Science, will be teaching these same principles in a

free MOOC class

that will launch fall 2013. To learn more or to enroll, visit

UC's Distance Learning & Outreach

.