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.
ISBN-13: 9781541750913
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Publication Date: 03-16-2021
Pages: 304
Product Dimensions: 5.80(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Discovering the DNA of Originality 9
2 Attention: See the World with Fresh Eyes 31
3 Levitation: Elevate Your Thinking 57
4 Imagination: Produce Out-of-This-World Ideas 81
5 Experimentation: Test Smarter to Learn Faster 113
6 Navigation: Maneuver to Soar … and to Avoid Being Shot Down 145
7 The ALIEN Model in Action 183
8 A Flexible Sequence 197
9 Digital: The Power to Bring Breakthrough Ideas to Life 213
10 Greet Your Inner ALIEN 235
Acknowledgments 255
Notes 257
Index 281
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