Alien Thinking: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas

How do people come up with truly original ideas? The answer is to think outside the box—way outside.
 
For the past decade, Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade, professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, have studied inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. These people, or “aliens,” as the authors call them, are able to make leaps of creativity, and use five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.
 
These five patterns—Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation, and Navigation—lead to a fresh and flexible approach to problem-solving. Alien thinkers know how to free the imagination so it can detect hard-to-observe patterns. They practice deliberate ways to retreat from the world in order to see the big picture underlying a problem. And they approach ideas in systematic ways that reflect the constraints of reality.
 
Through surprising and compelling stories, the authors show how readers can use this method to develop out-of-this-world ideas. ALIEN Thinking can help any of us find innovative solutions to the most difficult problems.

Cyril Bouquet is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD, where he orchestrates all kinds of innovation journeys for companies that seek to create the future.



Jean-Louis Barsoux is a Research Professor at IMD and has published extensively in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He is also the author of several books on management, including the award-winning Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People To Fail.




Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD and holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. He is the Director of the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. Michael has published nine books, more than thirty case studies, and appears frequently in the mainstream media.