ALIEN Thinking

How do people come up with truly original ideas? The answer is to think outside the boxway 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 patternsAttention,Levitation,Imagination,Experimentation, andNavigationlead 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 Thinkingcan help any of us find innovative solutions to the most difficult problems.