We recently connected with Robin Landa and have shared our conversation below.

Robin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My new book, The New Art of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential, is a step-by-step guide to generating, crystallizing, or amplifying worthwhile ideas.

After many years of teaching university students to generate good ideas and advising CEOs, CMOs, and entrepreneurs to do the same, I decided to share my idea generation system with the world.

No matter what goal you want to achieve, The New Art of Ideas offers a proven framework, called the Three Gs, for how to get worthwhile ideas, ones that benefit individuals, society and the planet.

Whether it is someone seeking to develop a new product, a faculty member who wants to teach their students to ideate, an organization hoping to rethink their sector, or an individual who wishes to invent something, write a story, design an athletic shoe, generate an idea for a business, or get more and better ideas on the job, my new system will help them generate worthwhile ideas.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When my student Brooke returned from her first week as an intern at a top New York City advertising agency, she said, “I was the only one on my team who rattled off one good idea after another. My creative director said we could use all my ideas. The other interns just sat there.” Now Brooke is a senior art director at another top New York ad agency, where she creates award-winning ad campaigns for national brands. So are thousands of my other former students, who are award-winning professionals working in advertising and design, creativity-dependent businesses demanding many ideas daily.
Called “one of the great teachers of our time” by the Carnegie Foundation, I hold the title of Distinguished Professor in the Michael Graves College of Kean University. I have taught university students as well as trained industry professionals to generate lots of worthwhile ideas. People consider me a “creativity guru.” But I prefer to think I’m more than that—I use my creative powers for good.
With a strong moral compass, I ask my university students, the faculty I mentor, as well as the many corporate clients I advise, “How does your goal benefit individuals, society, or our planet? How can your idea make life better?” I champion my university students, advocate for industry inclusion and equity, and provide university scholarships for meritorious students as well as students in need.
Like many creatives, I produce ideas in various forms—writing, design, advertising, fine art, screenwriting, and of course, my pedagogy. All of these endeavors feed my creative thinking and ability to communicate how to be strategically creative to others. I am the author of twenty-five books, including The New Art of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential; Strategic Creativity: A Business Field Guide for Advertising, Branding and Design; Graphic Design Solutions (sixth edition); Advertising by Design (fourth edition); and Nimble: Thinking Creatively in the Digital Age. Through my published tomes, my ideas teach people worldwide.
Many organizations have recognized my design, writing, teaching, art, and research, with awards from, among others, the National Society of Arts and Letters, the Art Directors Club of New Jersey, Graphic Design USA, and the National League of American Pen Women. Kean University named me 2013 Teacher of the Year and I’ve received several Kean Presidential Excellence awards for research. For my humanitarian work, I received the 2015 Human Rights Educator award, and my student design team won humanitarian awards as well.
For six years, I was a cochair of Design Incubation, a national design research organization, and I’ve juried design and advertising competitions. Crack the Spine literary journal published several of my short stories, and the journal’s editor nominated my story “Just Desserts” for Best of the Net. I presented about personal branding at Columbia University and now I am co-authoring a book with Greg Braun, retired deputy global chief creative officer of Commonwealth/McCann, titled Shareworthy: Storytelling for Advertising for Columbia University Press.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Without diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), you see life through a regular camera lens. DEI presents a way to see life through a wide-angle lens that produces panoramic images to create a more expansive perspective. When you embrace DEI, you put yourself in the path of amplified worthwhile ideas.

We each have our own perspective, our own view of the world shaped by our experiences, our communities, families, and education. This personal perspective is the lens through which we see the world and ourselves in it. Multiple perspective taking allows you to mentally walk in others’ shoes, to look at a situation, an idea, a life lived, or an event from the viewpoints of people who are different from you, who have had different experiences. That shift in perspective adds a fuller dimension to your ideas.

By considering things you didn’t think to consider before, you will assuredly find ideas of greater value to individuals, culture, and society. Fresh perspectives also lead to additional questions. By asking more questions of diverse people, you keep widening your scope and the impact of your idea. Here are three questions to ask: What goal can I set to have the best possible gain for the most possible people? Is there something I hadn’t considered before I took multiple perspectives? Is there a gain that is more equitable?

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Mystery surrounds creativity. If you believe that creativity is an inborn golden nugget of genius that only the talented few possess, then everything you think you know about creativity is wrong. Sure, some people are predisposed to thinking creatively. Is it nature, nurture, or a combination thereof? I won’t answer that fully here but what I will tell you from my own journey, research as a professor of design and advertising, and teaching is that the people who exhibit creative thinking are also those who are prone to practicing extreme curiosity, noticing possibilities, and are intentional observers, mindful listeners, and open to multiple perspectives.

Some might be prone to these behaviors but anyone can acquire them. No mystery there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.robinlanda.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proflanda/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robin.landa/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinlanda/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/rlanda
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiRfa41sH1Y-gDfIVqp6_9g
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@distinguishedproflanda