Book Review: Wind, J., (2025), Creativity in the Age of AI, De Gruyter

Over 70 years ago, Peter Drucker wrote: “Business has only two functions: marketing and innovation. These produce newness. All other functions are costs”. This is exactly what the present book addresses. While the major focus of the book is on creativity (i.e., innovation), supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is written by Dr. Jerry Wind^[1], one of the world’s leading marketing experts (The Lauder Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, at Wharton School).

While many books on creativity deal with this in a rather abstract way, this book provides tangible toolkits for how to enhance creativity – 12 suggestions in total. But the book also deals with the phenomenon of creativity in an impressive conceptual way, and the rigorous scientific thinking, particularly in the first four chapters of the book.

While there is a lot written about AI, this book is the only one, to this reviewer’s knowledge, that discusses impacts from AI on creativity, i.e., how the latter might be enhanced by the former. The AI dimension is central in all of this, i.e., more than an afterthought.

The book is clearly structured, with the first four chapters dealing with foundations of creativity, and the next 12 providing specific advice regarding how creativity can be enhanced, with the support of AI. There are great illustrations and helpful examples throughout the book. There are also sets of practical exercises, as well as succinct (not too many!) summary points at the end of each chapter.

A central insight is that AI does not replace human creativity. It amplifies it! More rapid prototyping, clearer in-depth strategic analysis, better marketing research, competitive intelligence and scenario planning. Hours of brainstorming can be reduced into minutes of AI-driven interaction! As Dr. Wind says, creativity matters more than ever.

As already noted, after an introductory overview chapter, the book starts with four foundational chapters on the fundamentals of creativity. What is it? It may start with imagination, but must be translated into reality, requiring originality and practical usefulness. Both novelty and usefulness are necessary! The author points out that there might be four forces, in particular, that are useful here - to have relevant skills; follow a (creativity) relevant process; to be primarily motivated and driven by the prospect of important results; and to try to find oneself in an environment that fosters cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Neuroscience is key. The creativity side of this seems to be focused on a so-called cognitive phase, with analytical thinking, then on a creative state with mind-wandering, for then to try to come up with a balancing of idea generation with critical assessments. For this reviewer, for instance, to take long walks has been a major way to enhance effective mind-wandering. For individuals to feel safe in this process is key. Thus, perhaps for business leaders, above all, it seems key to create an environment that includes reducing stress, promotes a positive mood, and provides opportunities for diverse experiences. It seems key to allow employees to take breaks, be playful, and encourage the pursuance of new activities.

AI can provide a lot of support to enhance creativity. And it is key that AI is seen as supporting, not replacing. This can be by generating better ideas, for strengthening these and/or for developing the most promising ideas into prototyping.

The author(s) offer an advantage to using six different chatbots regarding this (Table 3.1, p. 65) via ChatGPT, Gemini, Clauda, Copilot, Meta AI or Perplexity, and discusses how to use different chatbots in 21 diverse settings.

How to overcome obstacles. Creativity and innovation are then discussed, emphasizing a total eight factors for opening up one’s firm’s culture. For this reviewer, a lack of resources was hitting home in particular. I was developing two new learning concepts (Lorang Network, Lorange Institute), but found that I did not have sufficient resources to see these creative initiatives into full fruition.

In part two of the book, a set of 12 different approaches to enhance creativity are discussed. The first one is to challenge one’s mental models. Non-linear thinking seems particularly key here. And the authors point out that this process can be both stimulating and fun. They offer seven examples to illustrate this, including IKEA.

To try to create new paradigms for how one’s business operates is a second approach that is recommended. Nine examples are given. Lorange Network and Lorange Institute did indeed introduce new paradigms in the learning area.

So-called morphological analysis for enhancing creativity might be applied particularly well when addressing problems with multiple stakeholders, that might thus be decomposed into simpler problems, for then to be recomposed. But this approach might typically require both time and competent human resources. For a relatively small investment company, such as S. Ugelstad Invest, for instance, some 50 new investment proposals are examined per year, in addition to following up around 45 projects already invested in. There is simply not enough human capacity to extensively undertake this form of analysis, and it would be too expensive to add the additional human capacity also, if it could be found at all!

To try to find analogies to analyze, i.e., to apply benchmarking, represents a fourth approach. While this tool might be particularly powerful, it may often be hard to pull off due to the lack of relatively comparative businesses to benchmark against. At S. Ugelstad Invest we are only able to carry out this type of analysis within various segments of our shipping businesses, where there are plenty of relatively similar shipping firms.

Engaging in inter-disciplinary collaboration is next. So-called open innovations can come through this. The outlining of what might be dubbed “a smart city” might also come about to combine various disciplines, supported by AI.

To adopt various rules and tools to come up with better definition of problems, to generate ideas and for turning these into action, can also be useful. This chapter directs back to the discussion of neuroscience. That we have already reviewed. A particular potential problem might be such rules and tools might act as bureaucratic constraints, rather than supporting the creativity process. This reviewer finds the “six thinking hats” with different colors, proposed by Edward de Bono to be useful to better understand customer information: white – facts and information; red – feelings and emotions; black – negative risk assessment; yellow – positive benefits and values; green – creative thinking/new ideas; blue – the big picture/consider all factors.

So-called Inside the Box Thinking, as practiced by LEGO, in its Serious Play approach, represents another good way to practice the use of rules of tools.

The seventh recommended tool is to extract insights from trends. Here some 12 factors relating to customer behavior trends stand out. These might be reformulated into cultural trends, science/technology trends, business trends as well as advertising and media trends. Here the reviewer sense once more that highly diversified firms, such as investment companies like SUI might be able to counterbalance several of such trends, by being engaged in diverse activities where such trends may not correlate with each other. It should be noted that McKinsey seems to have been a particularly strong proponent of trend analysis.

Experimentation and to make several iterations are other approaches, recommendation number eight. This seems to be a particularly key activity. But regrettably this approach might be expensive. And the temptation to end experiments prematurely when one might see things to go in undesired directions may always be there. So, to actually obtain robust sets of experimental data, and ideally based on many iterations, can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. AI might be of support here, but this is not discussed extensively in the book.

To develop a strong sense of curiosity and imagination is recommendation number nine. To raise challenging questions seems key here. And the quality of one’s questions largely determines the quality of one’s creative process. On pages 232 – 233, the authors raise sets of typical organizational questions, focusing each first as a “default question” and then as a “better question”. While this reviewer fully agrees with this, a problem seems to be that in board meetings as well as in job interviews, “default questions” seem to be more in line with the ways typical questions are being revised. It is also interesting that the authors recommend creative frames and science fiction as ways to foster curiosity.

There are many new tools emerging. MIT, for instance, lists ten technology breakthroughs in 2025 to be considered particularly important. Medicine and agri-business are also discussed. In agriculture related businesses, it is interesting to note that cows can be fed in such different ways that CO₂ emissions might become significantly less. In summary, emerging technologies may expose us to possibilities that we might have never conceived before.

To customize one’s own toolkit is the penultimate recommendation. What are some of these tools? IDEO’s design thinking is one, Front2Back thinking to create a customer-centric approach is another. Dr. Wind has developed a ten-point scheme to develop growth-focused strategies.

The final recommendation is the cultivate courage and persistence. This is very much the issue to stay determined to “run the full distance”, i.e., to have enough courage and persistence to avoid failure. In this reviewer’s opinion, to get positive signs from the marketplace – additional students, more sign-ups – might be particularly key. Also, persons who might have built up good reputations based on earlier success, might be reluctant when they are faced with subsequent opportunities, being afraid of damaging established reputation. They may not have enough courage to pursue new things. This reviewer certainly faced this issue when he left IMD after 15 years at the helm, largely successful, to pursue new opportunities (Lorange Institute, Lorange Network). But I had the courage to do it! The persistence to see it all through was lacking, however. I ran out of funds, as previously discussed.

In a concluding chapter, we readers are encouraged to ignite our creative futures, by drawing on the four and twelve recommendations of the book. The conclusion starts out with another quote from Peter Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” The authors list 15 corporations, by their logos, that seem to be good at this. Unfortunately, however, some 13 of these 15 seem to be headquartered in the US, with only one European representative (Adidas) and Japanese (Honda), But there. A lot of creativity outside of the US also. What about Airbus relative to Boeing? Or BYD relative to Tesla?

An outline of a seven-lesson course by Wind/Corsea seems to have been introduced in the book more or less as an afterthought. And who is the moderator, session VI, Mr. Eric Burnstein (p. 300).

Having gone through the book carefully, I am left with the afterthought that many of the 12 recommendations tend to be rather marketing-focused, which is not that surprising, given Jerry Wind’s background. He is, after all, probably the world’s number one living marketing guru! Many of the AI-based discussions seem to have been added more or less as an afterthought.

But these small criticisms should perhaps be ignored. What is essential is the fact that this book is outstanding! Creativity is more critical today more than ever. AI is here to stay. It is particularly rewarding to read how AI seems to be able to support and enhance creativity in so many ways. The bottleneck of being creative is less narrow!

This is perhaps the most important book I have reviewed for a long time. While I have read it primarily from a business academician’s vantage point, it seems clear that the book has broader implications too. The authors discuss how creativity and the arts are definitely heavily interrelated. But more creativity in politics is also called for. Do the bulk of our politicians possess the necessary degree of curiosity as well as a sufficient AI aptitude to take advantage of the book’s recommendations? This reviewer doubts it. And what about out public sector administrators? They are appropriately faced with “doing more with less resources”, to dismantle burdensome bureaucracy, to be more creative! But much of the public sector thinking seems to be out of sync with many of the recommendations in this book.

So, I recommend this book to a wider audience, not only business executives, but also politicians and leaders from the public sector. Individuals in general should read this book.

^[1] To give a complete picture of the authorship, the title page of the book indicates that he has written this book with Mukul Pandya and Deborah Yao. Thus, while these two must have been centrally involvedin the research and writing that has led to this book, they can probably not be considered as bona fide co-writers as such.