Min Basadur

Basadur was born in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto, where he attended Humberside Collegiate and played baseball, basketball and football. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in engineering physics in 1961.

Basadur was hired by Procter & Gamble in Hamilton, Ontario and then transferred to the company's research and development headquarters in Cincinnati in 1967. He received three U.S patents for his work there and brought several new industrial products to market.[5]

While employed in Cincinnati, Basadur became acquainted with the teachings of Sid Parnes, who became a lifetime friend and colleague. Sid was a creativity researcher and teacher at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in Buffalo, New York founded by Alex Osborn. Building on the teachings of Parnes, Osborn and other's at CPSI, Basadur expanded on these methods within Procter & Gamble to develop a more applicable process for corporate innovation.[6] Procter and Gamble became his own laboratory for creative research. While at Procter & Gamble, Min proved the absolute importance of accurate problem definition in the problem solving process and achieving breakthrough insights. Here, Min also became aware of the practicality of focusing on the phrase How Might We in real world corporate problem solving to positively define problems. Sid suggested that several phrases could be used to define problems, including "How To?", "Way's To?", "In What Way's Might We?" and "How Might We?" and selected "In What Ways Might We?" for his teachings in Buffalo. Min found the phrase "How Might We?" was most accepted among team members in industry in the critical step of defining problems. "How Might We?" eventually became an integral component in Basadur's "Why? - What's Stopping?" analysis and Challenge Mapping processes.

He continued to research methods of stimulating and harnessing creativity at Frito-Lay, Ford and Pepsico During that time, he also earned his MBA from Xavier University and PhD from the University of Cincinnati. His doctoral dissertation received the S. Rains Wallace Award for best doctoral research in the area of industrial and organizational psychology by the American Psychological Association[7] The significance of this research established a landmark understanding that innovative and creative thinking can be learned and improved.

By 1981 Basadur had developed a methodology which he called Simplexity (originally Simplex) and a set of related tools for creative problem solving that could be used to improve creative performance in organizations.[8] His method was based on encouraging and facilitating unobstructed thinking and developing a sense of shared ownership and responsibility among participants for the solution they collectively identify. Basadur conducted extensive research to back up his claims that this collaborative process significantly improved the likelihood of successful solutions being identified and implemented.[9] Basadur founded the Center for Research in Applied Creativity to provide training in Simplexity Thinking to corporations, public institutions and governments.

To help organizations identify and encourage creative individuals among their staff, Basadur developed the Basadur Creative Problem Solving Profile (CPSP), and Inventory designed to determine an individual's style of creative problem solving, by measuring his or her preferred activities within the creativity process. The four styles Basadur identified are generation, conceptualization, optimization and implementation.[10]

Basadur published two books on the subject of developing creativity, Flight to Creativity: How to Dramatically Improve Your Creative Performance. in 1994 and The Power of Innovation: How to Make Innovation a Way of Life and Put Creative Solutions to Work in 1995. He also contributed chapters to a number of books, and published many articles on the subject.[11] He has also made presentations at various scientific meetings.

In 2016, Basadur published a third book, Design-Centered Entrepreneurship, with Michael Goldsby.

• Google Scholar report