Osborn was an advertising man - co-founder of the great New York BBDO agency - and
as such has tended to be ignored by the more academic/psychologically based writers.
They do so at their peril.
It's fair to say that Applied Imagination is the single most important book in the
whole catalogue of creativity.
I was well aware that Osborn had come up with the concept of brainstorming, and a
good number of the idea generation techniques used by everyone from de Bono to Creativity
Unleashed (some with more acknowledgement for Osborn's input than others) - but I
was amazed just how much of the material we have devised independently over the years
- on such matters as environment and personal development, for instance - is all
there in this seminal 1953 classic.
Applied Imagination is a big book - around 400 pages - and though it's not a light
read, in part through its age, it isn't academically tedious either. If you are doing
anything in the sphere of creativity and you don't have a copy of this book on the
shelf you MUST get one, alongside a framework oriented book like our Imagination
Engineering.
