Bryan Berg, holder of the Guinness World Record for the world’s tallest house of cards every year since 1992, stacks regular playing cards during Inspiration Expo at Hasbro in Pawtucket.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PAWTUCKET — The elderly man, white-haired, stoop-shouldered and dressed in a conservative gray suit, mounted a rostrum Thursday afternoon in a one-story Pawtucket building.

He began to speak to the gathering of thinkers, mostly early- and mid-career engineers and graphic designers.

“I found that the people who had come up with ideas that no one had thought of were the poets,” Sterling P. Newberry said before launching into “The Search For Tomorrow,” a poem he had written for the occasion of his invitation to the Inspiration Expo.

It was perhaps a turn unexpected by the group of about 200 people that had stopped to listen to a 94-year-old man who is one of the founders of the Microscope Society of America and the inventor of a type of x-ray microscope.

Hasbro had invited Newberry and about 40 engineers, artists and others –– including the man who holds the world record for stacking the most playing cards –– to its Pawtucket headquarters to meet and talk with the employees who design its games and toys.

Company executives hope the two-hour event, held in the company’s cafeteria, will spark the “big idea” for a new game, mechanism or production process from the dozens of workers who listened to speakers such as Newberry, watched Bryan Berg create his playing-card towers or talked to artists about their work.

Leif Askeland, Hasbro’s vice president of engineering, gestured to a nearby table. On it sat a collection of multicolored geometric shapes created from the “origami of mathematics,”

Designers, Askeland said, have to be patient and open to new ideas.

“Even though you can’t immediately take this and turn it into a toy, it makes you think,” said Askeland, who helped create Furby and other lifelike animatronic toys.

Hasbro first held the event in 2008 and it is now one of a number of programs the company employs to invigorate its product-development process. Among the other programs are “Bring Out Your Dead” and “Grand Idea.” The former, started in Hasbro’s offices in England, offers designers the chance to resurrect ideas killed off in previous production cycles. The latter gives designers a chance, at two minutes each, to pitch a concept directly to Hasbro’s chief executive officer, Brian Goldner.

“No bad idea is bad idea,” said Leigh Anne Cappello, a vice president for design at Hasbro and the event’s organizer. “It’s just bad timing.”

Those ideas can come from making use of their scant unscheduled work time and everyday items, said Hasbro toy designer Mark Foster, as he waited to talk to Arthur Ganson about his machine-like kinetic sculptures.

“When time allows, we do a lot of experimentation with found objects,” said Foster, who helps design Tonka toys.

Experimentation is part of the creative process, said Ganson, who created a popular construction toy known as Toobers & Zots.

And inspiration is not a one-way event.

“I’m surrounded by so many people doing interesting things, it’s inspiring,” Ganson said of the Hasbro event, even if “it just gets translated as the impulse to work.”

While Hasbro’s workers and their guests fed their imaginations as they noshed on canapés and conversation, the toymaker’s customers are the ones who will be satisfied later, said Cappello, the event’s organizer.

“What they get is stronger, richer, more powerful ideas coming out of Hasbro,” Cappello said.

pgrimald@projo.com