Problem solving

Tudor Rickards PhD (born 1941 in Pontypridd, Wales) is an author on creativity and leadership in business and management. He is based at Manchester Business School in the UK, where he is Professor of Creativity and Organizational Change] Rickards is an influential figure in the study and application of creativity, particularly in Europe.

By the mid-70s he had established international contacts. A collaboration with Horst Geschka at the Battelle Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, lead to a joint publication comparing practices and deficiencies in the application of creativity techniques in the UK and in Germany. Furthermore he participated in most of the European creativity conferences as a speaker or active participant. During this time he intensively worked on the development of networks enabling European creativity practitioners to work together and explore alternatives to the dominant US models.

He co-founded the academic journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, in 1991 and is Alex Osborn Visiting Professor at State University of New York, Buffalo, a lifetime position offered to scholars who are deemed to enrich teaching at the University’s Centre for Studies in Creativity.

Rickards is regularly quoted in the British media. He is a pioneer and advocate of the ‘Manchester Method’ – the system of creative and applied learning championed by Manchester Business School – on which he has written widely.

He was an early promoter in Europe of the TRIZ system of creativity and idea generation, inviting TRIZ pioneer Dr Phan Dung to speak at EACI (European Association of Creativity and Innovation) conferences and publishing some of the first papers in English by Dr Phan Dung on the subject in Creativity and Innovation Management.

Challenging traditional models of creative thinking, leadership, problem solving and team building, Rickards’ research has been described by The Financial Times as non-traditional. The influences and inspirations for his insights and research are diverse, and include chess, poetry, sport and politics. The world of nature has also been a powerful source of inspiration, with well-publicised work on intelligent horsemanship] and the lessons it offers for the workplace, and profiling management and leadership styles using animal behaviour.] His work has been criticised for attempting to learn lessons from studying animal rather than human behaviour.