Ever since PR began, it has been important to be creative.

Back in the middle of the last century, Ed Bernays - "inventor" of the press release and Father of the Public Relations industry - was being creative with hairnets on behalf of Venida. (Google it. Fascinating stuff.) Creativity is built into PR's DNA.

As with so much, the digital age has not changed this. It has just speeded it up. PR has become both more frenetic and lower staffed. We all have more to do and less time to do it. Impossible? Certainly not. But we have to work efficiently if we are going to work effectively.

This applies across the board, of course, but nowhere more than in creative thinking. There just isn't time to sit around waiting for an idea to occur to you. And it isn't effective to keep recycling ideas you have had before. The giant cheque was a great idea once. After a million times or so, it gets wearing. You need systems for stimulating ideas. You need to understand the key differences between creative thinking and linear, logical thinking. You need to be able to switch between the two effortlessly.

All these things can be learned. Keith Henshall, founder of the Centre, studied Creative Problem Solving as part of his MBA. "I took that option because I thought is would be a soft option," he confesses. "I was wrong. It is one of the few parts of the course I still use daily."

These techniques are taught on our course on Creativity in PR; taught by Keith or Glen Poole - the brain behind all the Fathers for Justice stunts. Be warned, it doesn't chuck you a few ideas. It teaches you how to tap into your creativity.

In the digital age, when we have seconds to come up with a Twitter response, it can be reassuring to have a creativity toolkit to dip into.