Creativity and innovation workshops

Help your team solve the problems that keep coming back.

Practical workshops that give your team a structured way to work through a hard problem, from agreeing what the problem is to deciding what to do about it. Your people work on your own challenges, so the session ends with progress you can use.

Why I do this

I was lucky to start my career at Texas Instruments and was surrounded by some very talented people. TI invested heavily in us, and I went on a lot of courses. Most were what you’d expect, but a few stayed with me: Quality Function Deployment, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, Marketing High Technology and the Seven QC Tools. I still have my TI copy of The Memory Jogger, a pocket guide to the Seven QC Tools, 40 years later.

I loved how practical it was and wanted to write something as useful for problem solving. Building the Creativity and Innovation workshops gave me that chance. I overshot seven tools by some distance, but I’ve collected a few in 40 years and I’m still adding more.

Andrew Faulkner

How I can help

Workshops for teams

A three-module program, Creativity and Innovation: Unlock Your Creative Genius, run with your team on problems they are working on now.

Explore the workshops

The book

Your Creativity Toolkit brings the tools from the workshops together in one practical reference, organized by the stage of work they help with.

About the book

Speaking and teaching

Talks for conferences and associations, drawing on my teaching at the University of Ottawa and Algonquin College.

Book a talk

“The sessions were interactive and practical, and our people had the opportunity to apply the tools to challenges Birchcliff was facing at the time.”

Theo van der Werken, Chief Operating Officer, Birchcliff Energy Ltd.

How a workshop runs

The program is built around your team’s own problems, with time between sessions to put the tools to work.

Learn the tools together

Interactive sessions where the group practises each tool on a sample problem.

Apply them to your challenges

Teams take a live business problem and work it through with the tools.

Come back and present

After time to refine their work, teams come back and present their outcomes to the group.

The book

Your Creativity Toolkit

More than 40 tools and methods for defining problems, generating ideas, choosing between options and testing a plan before you commit. Each one has step-by-step instructions, a worked example and notes for the person running the session.

Kindle edition available November 27, 2026. Paperback coming soon.

“What makes it a noteworthy contribution to creative business problem solving is ordering the material along a roadmap that pinpoints when a tool can be a difference maker.”

Jac van Beek, MBA, FCMC, uOttawa Faculty of Engineering and Telfer School of Management

About Andrew

I spent my career in B2B technology as a product line director, VP Marketing and running my own sales and marketing company. Today I teach a graduate course in creativity and innovation at the University of Ottawa, teach at Algonquin College, and run OPMMA and ProductCamp Ottawa, both of which I co-founded.

The name goes back to 2008. When Zarlink decided not to fund a second generation of its acoustic echo cancellation products, a few of us from the product line team left to try to buy the line ourselves. Our system architect suggested Cranial-8, after the eighth cranial nerve, which carries sound to the brain. The acquisition never closed, and the company has changed direction a few times since, but the name stayed.

Read the full story

Is there a problem your team keeps circling?

Book a 20-minute call. We’ll talk through the challenge and whether a workshop is the right fit.