Chic Thompson, founder of WAGiLabs

Chic Thompson is the author of What a Great Idea!, which has sold over 250,000 copies and been translated into five languages, and the founder of WAGiLabs, a nonprofit creativity incubator that helps kids build curiosity, compassion, and courage through hands-on “Kidpreneur” projects. He is a Batten Fellow of Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, where he teaches creative leadership.

Over more than three decades, Thompson has helped organizations and individuals think more creatively through workshops, keynote speaking, books, and video training, working with clients including Disney, W.L. Gore, Pepsi, NASA, GE, and HP. His career took shape at W.L. Gore & Associates, where he ran brainstorming sessions on new applications for Gore-Tex — an experience that shaped the “opposite thinking” framework he’s built his teaching around. In 2001, Harvard Business School published a case study on his speaking career, also titled “What a Great Idea!”

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