Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono was born in Malta on 19 May 1933. Educated at St. Edward's College, Malta, he then gained a medical degree from the University of Malta. Following this, he proceeded as a Rhodes Scholar to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained an MA in psychology and physiology. He represented Oxford in polo and set two canoeing records. He then gained a PhD degree in medicine from Trinity College, Cambridge, an honorary DDes (Doctor of Design) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and an honorary LLD from the University of Dundee.

De Bono held faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge (where he helped to establish the university's medical school), London and Harvard. He was a professor at Malta, Pretoria, Central England and Dublin City University. De Bono held the Da Vinci Professor of Thinking chair at University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona, US. He was one of the 27 Ambassadors for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009.

The originator of the term 'Lateral Thinking', de Bono wrote 85 books with translations into 46 languages. He taught his thinking methods to government agencies, corporate clients, organizations and individuals, privately or publicly in group sessions. He promoted the World Center for New Thinking (2004-2011), based in Malta, which applied Thinking Tools to solution and policy design on the geo-political level.

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.

In May 1994, he gave a half-hour Opinions lecture televised on Channel 4 and subsequently published in The Independent as "Thinking Hats On".

In 1995, he created the 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.

In 2005, he was nominated (and reached the shortlist) for the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Schools from over 20 countries have included de Bono's thinking tools into their curriculum,  and he has advised and lectured at board level at many of the world's leading corporations.

Convinced that a key way forward for humanity is better language, he published The Edward de Bono Code Book in 2000. In this book, he proposed a suite of new words based on numbers, where each number combination represents a useful idea or situation that currently does not have a single-word representation. For example, de Bono code 6/2 means "Give me my point of view and I will give you your point of view." Such a code might be used in situations where one or both of two parties in a dispute are making insufficient effort to understand the other's perspective.

Asteroid 2541 Edebono discovered by Luboš Kohoutek is named after him.