Cracking the Creativity Code (ePub)

Arie Ruttenberg is co-founder of Israel’s largest advertising agency, where for over 30 years he applied his creative skills daily. Later, he started a new enterprise, Club 50, which provides tools to those 50 and over for reinventing their lives. At present he is working on a new startup, Creativity Bank.

Arie was born in Tel Aviv, on August 8, 1948, less than three months after the state of Israel achieved independence. His parents were Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel a year before his birth, from the European death camps. He was born at the height of Israel’s War of Independence, and at the age of 8, experienced another war, the Sinai Campaign (1956). At age 19, as a combat soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, he was seriously injured by an explosive device that damaged both his sight and his hearing, and was declared 100 percent disabled. He ascribes his creativity and innovative skills to the instability and the hardships in his life, which forced him constantly to search for original solutions in order to deal with reality.

Despite the physical challenges Ruttenberg began to study economics and management at the Technion, Haifa, in 1969. Technion is Israel’s leading science and technology university, and among the best institutions of its kind in the world. At Technion, Ruttenberg met Shlomo Maital, one of his economics instructors, and with him researched and published an article that was to become a path-breaking paper in behavioral economics and experimental economics. From that time, they have remained in close touch, stimulating each other with ideas on creativity, in the course of their careers.

On completing his Technion studies, Ruttenberg chose to enter an industry that gave full expression to his creativity, the world of advertising. After a meteoric career of only four years, during which he became a partner in an ad agency, he opened his own advertising agency, in 1979, at age