Alan Iny

Alan Iny has the pleasure of spending his entire working life on creativity in business. With Boston Consulting Group since 2003, he has trained thousands of people on how to think creatively, and he works with a wide range of clients across industries worldwide. He also has a deep focus on navigating uncertainty, using scenarios to help clients think more expansively about the future.

Alan is a member of the firm’s Corporate Finance & Strategy practice leadership team and has expertise in innovation, transformation, and organization design. With BCG's Luc de Brabandere, he coauthored Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity in 2013. The book is available in 11 languages, and Publishers Weekly called it "a must-read for anyone in a leadership position who dares to look at the world in new ways."

His writing with Luc de Brabandere has also appeared in various journals, including Strategy & Leadership and Technological Forecasting & Social Change. You can follow Alan @Alan_Iny on Twitter.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

MBA, management and social enterprise, Columbia Business School
BS, honors, McGill University

Publications and Videos

Bold Plans Do Not Come from Old Planning Processes

In this pandemic year, leaders who embrace bold vision-setting, backstopped by robust analysis, can create a once-in-a-career opportunity to change the trajectory of their organizations.

Building Your Uncertainty Advantage

For some companies, disruption is a risk to be avoided. For others, it’s an opportunity to be embraced. With better sensing, modeling, and planning capabilities, businesses can use upheaval as a catapult to success.

Can Your Strategy Survive These Four Futures?

BCG’s global expert on scenarios and creativity, Alan Iny, takes you on a tour of four distinct and plausible future competitive environments—and offers perspectives on how to shape smart strategies in the face of uncertainty.

Reigniting Creativity in Business

It’s a paradox: creativity has never been more essential to competitiveness in the business world, but the critical approach to practical creativity in organizations is often lacking. Alan Iny offers a key to the well-meaning exhortation to “think outside the box”: apply doubt to the very models and philosophies that make up the box itself.

Have You Future-Proofed Your Strategy?

We present four scenarios that can help stretch your thinking beyond forecasts. They prepare organizations for the unpredictable and for whatever lies ahead.

How to Run a Brainstorm Virtually

The classic principles are more important than ever, but you also need to consider new rules of engagement and how to create virtual intimacy.

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Seizing Opportunity in Adversity in Tech

This four-step approach helps tech companies create competitive advantage at a time when the industry is facing challenges on many fronts.

Zig-Zag and the Art of Strategic Creativity

Sometimes the shortest distance between today’s offerings and business models and tomorrow’s innovations isn’t a straight line.

Five Ways to Nudge Your Brainstorms to Greatness

Truly great brainstorming is rare. Increase your odds with these five hacks from behavioral economics.

New Boxes for Back to School: Looking at Education in Fresh Ways

Identifying and challenging our assumptions about education is critical if we’re ever going to find new ways of solving deep-seated problems.

How Does Creativity Really Work?

In a live chat on LinkedIn, Alan Iny, BCG’s senior specialist for creativity and scenarios and coauthor of Thinking in New Boxes, answered questions and gave concrete tips on bringing creativity to a range of business problems.

It’s Not a Failure to Fail

If you try something new and fail, explains BCG’s Alan Iny, you’ve at least shown a willingness to take risks—one of the hallmarks of creativity.

Deep Expertise, Broad Experience