Think Bigger

How do we get our best ideas? And, once we have an idea, how do we know if we should pursue it? That’s what the Think Bigger course is about: what it takes to create our best ideas. Over the last decade, modern science—in particular, neuro- and cognitive sciences—have revealed to us how creative ideas develop in the human mind. Here, I present this new knowledge to you as a six-step method called Think Bigger. In every class session, I draw on the relevant science and on many instructive examples to explain the method’s rationale and how it works in practice. We use a workshop format, where every session includes individual in-class exercises, or “creative challenges,” which enable you to develop your skills as an ideator. In addition, all students join a group project, take on an important problem facing our world, and strive to use the six-step method to generate a solution which will be showcased on the last day of class. Think Bigger is a new and unique ideation methodology only offered here at Columbia Business School. It is different from previous mainstream methods of ideation, like Design Thinking. We will use as a textbook a complete draft of Think Bigger, a book by me that will be published in April 2023.