Following this, he proceeded as a Rhodes Scholar in 1955 to Christ Church, Oxford,[4] where he gained an MA in psychology and physiology.

De Bono held the Da Vinci Professor of Thinking chair at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona, US.

[5] He taught his thinking methods to government agencies, corporate clients, organizations and individuals, privately or publicly in group sessions.

In 1976, de Bono took part in a radio debate for the BBC with British philosopher A. J. Ayer, on the subject of effective democracy.

[8] Starting on Wednesday 8 September 1982, the BBC ran a series of 10 weekly programmes entitled de Bono's Thinking Course.

[10] In 1995, he created a futuristic documentary film, 2040: Possibilities by Edward de Bono, depicting a lecture to an audience of viewers released from a cryogenic freeze for contemporary society in the year 2040.

[5] Convinced that a key way forward for humanity is a better language, he published The Edward de Bono Code Book in 2000.

In 2000, de Bono advised a UK Foreign Office committee that the Arab–Israeli conflict might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread (e.g. pita flatbread).

Those taking this approach have been concerned primarily with developing creativity, secondarily with understanding it, but almost not at all with testing the validity of their ideas about it.

[...] Perhaps the foremost proponent of this approach is Edward De Bono, whose work on lateral thinking and other aspects of creativity has had what appears to be considerable commercial success.

Regarding Edward de Bono they write, [he] is more interested in the usefulness of developing ideas than proving the reliability or efficacy of his approach.

However, in a more recent study with Australian aboriginal children (Ritchie and Edwards, 1996), little evidence of generalisation was found other than in the area of creative thinking.

[27] De Bono was awarded honorary degrees from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,[28] and the University of Dundee.