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Some organisations that systematically use Lateral Thinking :

Companies Using The de Bono Techniques
The de Bono Thinking Techniques are now rapidly being taken up by organisations as diverse as :

ING, Saatchi & Saatchi, IBM, Unilever, Shell International, DTI, American Express,
Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, John Lewis, Barclays Bank, Siemens, Channel 4 Television, National Audit Office, JP Morgan and the Civil Aviation Authority....

BMW : BusinessWeek - 16/10/2006 : "The Secret of BMW's Success"
BMW's reputation for innovation can be traced to its equally innovative lateral management techniques

Motorolla
Motorola used Lateral Thinking to develop a high-tech, hand-held communications device.
Challenges:
• Create an ultra high-tech device with the price tag of less than $800
Methods:
• Use Concept Generation, Concept Extraction, Reverse Provocation, Random Object and Six Thinking Hats to develop the ideal product
Results:
• Motorola develops and markets the Accompli 009 Personal Communicator

Prudential
At Prudential Insurance Canada, Ron Barbaro’s PO: “you die before you die” led to the hugely successful idea of “living benefits” – if you contract a terminal illness you benefit from 75% of the insurance money before you die – and catapulted him into the big time. Prudential Insurance USA was the largest insurance group in the world, and partly as a result of this idea, Barbaro became president of it.

Shell Oil
In a seminar with Edward de Bono organized by Shell Oil, in London in 1971, someone challenged the usual method of drilling for oil, which is vertically, straight down into the ground. Shell Oil modified the traditional vertical way of drilling an oil well by developing this into a right angle well for extractor along the horizontal strata. Production was six fold and the system is now adopted by all oil companies worldwide.

DuPont
David Tanner at DuPont first came upon Edward de Bono’s work in an article in Business Week. At the time, Tanner was a director of research at DuPont, then a company with 125,000 employees and a $45 billion gross. He had responsibility for the Industrial Fibres Division. He recalls, “It was a $2 billion division, and I had laboratories at six different sites. I read this article about creativity and we had at that time a lot of competition coming on stream and I thought we needed some redirection. The article sparked the idea. Then I received from Diane McQuaig (Edward’s manager) a note that Edward would be speaking un in Toronto that spring, the spring of 1986. So I went up there to Toronto….
…We had a big R&D budget. There were six businesses that I had responsibility for in R&D. Teflon was one of these. That was relatively small. The major ones were – you know, bullet resistant vests? Kevlar, a fiber 5 times the strength of steel, with equal weight. In our division we had several growth businesses and we had Edward in many times. I took him down to our different sites. I used to meet with lab directors every month and I was very excited about this creative thinking. I had even laid out some charts using Edward’s stuff. The whole idea was to come up with new ideas by instilling a creative environment…
The last two years at DuPont I spent as the director of the DuPont Centre for Creativity and Innovation. We had had a lot of successes in my division and the corporate management asked me to do this on a corporate basis…when I became involved with the corporate effort on creative thinking I had Edward do a seminar…We had set up a creative thinking network across the company and called it the Oz Group…”
Tanner had written a book (Total Creativity, 1997), showing some of the day-to-day applications of Edward’s work at the company – how, for example, Gene Pontrelli, a research fellow at DuPont trained in Lateral Thinking techniques, led a group looking for ways to develop Lycra beyond its current limits. The group set about listing all the things that people took for granted about Lycra. The escape method led to a whole range of provocations. One was PO: “Applications of Lycra for non-persons” from which sprang the idea to clad dolls in Lycra, even racehorses (during warm-up). And from this there came “ a new product concept unrelated to textile fabrics or clothing” and a programme to develop it.
On another occasion, the Information systems Division of DuPont needed to reduce costs. Group Manager Nancy McDonald led a lateral thinking session to a reverse provocation Po: “costs should be reversed by spending more money”.
“This provocation” writes Tanner, “generated the idea that spending more money on fewer vendors would provide leverage to obtain large discounts. The approach was to cut the number of vendors and negotiate better prices on high volume orders, and led to an annual savings of over $300,000. Applying this concept to maintenance saved a further several hundred thousand dollars annually.”
Again at DuPont, Nomex had designed a new computer system and wanted to minimize the cost and maximize the efficiency of installation.
Group manager Ben Jones, trained in Lateral Thinking, headed the group masterminding the operation. Addressing the problem, they focused on the engineering department, where pre-assembly costs of the equipment were an important element. As things sometimes go even outside a lateral thinking session, a provocation arose by way of the Exaggeration method, ‘PO: Eliminate the engineering department!”. When the uproar died down, the thinking moved to a decision for engineering to link up with the manufacturing and technical departments to assemble and integrate the equipments actually on site. “This approach succeeded”, writes Tanner, “saving well over $1 million in development costs and accelerating installation and estimated one to two years”. The provocation also marked the beginning of a closer relationship between the various departments.

ABB
At electronics and electric giant ABB in Finland a project normally taking thirty days was reduced to two days through parallel thinking.

Olympic Games
At the 1976 Olympic Games, $1 billion was lost. Not through carelessness, but misguided thinking, as it turned out. The International Olympic Committee approached city after city to find someone to take the next games on and found all unwilling until finally Moscow reckoned they could make it work. That in itself did little to restore confidence that the games were other than a fiscal gamble, until the state of California agreed to stage the 1984 Games and appointed Peter Ueberroth to organize them. The result was $225 million profit. Why? Lateral Thinking, as Ueberroth explained in an interview in the Washington Post of 30 September 1984. …All these tools can be taken and used systematically.