Paul Sloane is an author and public speaker on lateral thinking and innovation. He was born in 1950 in Johnstone, Scotland and was educated at St Joseph's College, Blackpool and Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he read Engineering. He is the leading author of books of lateral thinking puzzles, many of the books are co-authored with Des MacHale. He worked for 11 years for IBM became MD for Ashton-Tate and VP International for Mathsoft. He is the head of the Innovation Unit at the British Quality Foundation. He lives in Camberley and he writes and speaks on innovation, creativity and lateral thinking in business.He has been introduced as the Chief Executive of Research and Development of IBM by a conference website to which he has been invited as the keynote speaker. This claim doesn't seem true based on his webpage information.