It wasn't the first difficult challenge Suzanne had faced since taking on the project of building a creativity center within Polaroid. For Suzanne, the journey to this stage of her career had taken many twists and turns. Rejection as an artist led her to a masters in aesthetic education. Poverty in that field nudged her into an entrepreneurial venture taking pictures of people dressed up in costumes standing in front of historic buildings. Then opportunity knocked when someone from Polaroid saw her Instant Ancestors business and asked her to join them in their efforts to create other entrepreneurial ventures based on taking pictures.

Suzanne travelled the world in this endeavor, working in sales, marketing, strategic planning and new product development. Frustration gave her the next push. "When I got into the strategic planning and new product development areas," she states, "I started to get really frustrated with the inability of the sales people to see the potential of the business. New ideas were being met with a lot of resistance. I decided that I needed to help them see possibilities, because my plans kept being rejected.

"I started reading about creativity. It was like when you find a little thread and you start tugging on it and before you know it, this whole thing is unravelling in front of you. I started pulling on the string of "What's going on in creativity?" and before I knew it I was completely emersed in the topic and realized that it was the work I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

"I was collecting information and doing research in my free time, looking into what was going on in the field. I looked at other companies, at universities and what consultants were doing. I created a huge, colorful mindmap that showed who was doing what and what approaches they were taking. It became very clear that there was something that could be done to impact the level of creativity within a company and that we should be doing it at Polaroid."

Suzanne used her background in strategic planning to develop a comprehensive plan for her vision of a creativity center that could service the entire company. By the time she presented her plan to senior management, she had developed full budget support from operations managers who agreed to "purchase" certain services from the center.

"Everything we do is applied to real issues."

"The day of the presentation," Suzanne remembers, "everyone was telling me about all the cost cutting that was going on and making it sound like the chances of this proposal being approved were very limited. They suggested that I just do a straight- forward presentation and let it go. Well, I did the exact opposite ... a wild presentation with fractal images and poetry ... in addition to all the logistics, finances and benefits. It focused on five major elements including the climate for creativity, thinking skills, management of creativity, individual motivation and setting up a physical space as a symbol that there was something going on in the company.

"After I did the slide presentation and everyone was sitting around the big mahogany table, the lights came back on and no one said anything. I thought, 'Uh, oh.' Finally, Mac Booth, leaned forward and said, 'I want to commend you for taking the initiative to put this proposal together. How could we not be in support of it? We want to encourage you to go ahead.'

"After that, it still took another six months to get the center going because of organizational issues. No one was quite sure where creativity belonged ... which department or division. Even though I was coming with the financial support, it was unclear where it should wind up organizationally. It finally wound up in the new products area under a woman who was known for her ability to take a new idea and get it going. She had been instrumental in our total quality initiative and devel- oping a new product delivery process. It was a good place for me to land.

"When I started looking for space, I told the realtor I wanted something cheap, right under everyone's noses that no one wanted. So we found this great space where Dr. Land first had his office and laboratory. It is a historical landmark. Not only did Dr. Land start here but the Fulton steam engine was invented in this building and the first telephone call was made here. My family came up from Pennsylvania and helped fix up the space. We collected furniture from throughout the building ... nothing matches and everything's painted odd colors. It looks sort of like a play room. It is an L-shaped room with a huge coffee shop, complete with kitchen area and one wall of books and resources. I wanted it to look like a cafe or salon where people could drop in and have conversations. During our training sessions, we take long breaks and spend a lot of time in this area.

"The main training room can hold about 20 people and we have two other smaller spaces where we can do break-out work. It's a place that people look forward to coming into because it doesn't look like a corporate meeting room. It has Playdoh, Silly Putty, toys, materials and artwork all over the place so that it's an uplifting area. I even had special lights put in to simulate daylight to help keep energy level up.

"Everything we do is applied to real business issues. I want them to learn the techniques but also accomplish their objectives in the process. I do a pre-consult with them to determine their ideal outcomes. They always get two sets of results ... one is that their group develops new creative thinking skills and the second is that they get the new product ideas or concepts they're looking for. We agree on how many of those they need to have and whether they should be adaptive or innovative. It's a three part process -- pre-consul- tation, the actual session, and follow-up. I want to get people out of the idea that creative ideas occur only in a workshop and have them look at what occurs to them over the next couple of days or weeks."

At first Suzanne concentrated on tools such as deBono's 6 Thinking Hats and the Creative Problem Solving process. However, she has stepped back from the tools and techniques approach and is now looking at creative thinking at a more fundamental level. "We have started developing some of our own methods for building thinking skills," she states. "I'm focused now on the role of imagery in creativity because I've found that whenever I introduced those approaches I was getting higher quality ideas and thinking. This year we opened a visual thinking lab, using images from the Polaroid collection and have started offering workshops on the power of inquiry and perception-based creativity."

Suzanne is now in the third year of the lab, learning and experimenting as she goes along. And, how did her group of engineers and scientists working on the camera platform do? She states, "In that first two-day session, we had them challenge assumptions and look at things completely differently, break everything apart, come up with new materials and look for ways they could be interchangeable. By the end of the second day, they still didn't know how they were going to do it but they believed it was possible. It was a huge shift. The new product design is now underway."