Cyril Bouquet

Alien Thinking

  • Alien Thinking

  • How did a balloonist circumnavigate the earth without fuel? How did an inventor design a device that creates electrical power from human footsteps? How did the WHO figure out how to treat and reduce the transmission of Ebola?

    They all used alien thinking.

    For over a decade, innovation experts Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade have studied individuals around the world who have made leaps of creative genius. Their research shows that they are five patterns of thinking that distinguish true innovators from the rest of us. These five patterns are marked by a flexibility and a freshness of approach that transcends conventional problem-solving:

    - Attention
    - Levitation
    - Imagination
    - Experimentation
    - Navigation

    Alien thinkers know how to free their imagination and 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 prototype ideas in systematic ways to reflect feedback and the constraints of reality.

    Alien Thinking will help you innovate better and develop world-changing ideas of your own.

RELEASED 18/03/2021

Cyril Bouquet is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD. He has published his research in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and the Academy of Management Journal amongst others.

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