Alien Thinking

From three top innovation experts at IMD Business School comes a smart new model for innovative thinking and problem solving. How do people come up with truly original ideas? For the past decade, the authors of this book have studied individuals who have made leaps of creativity-inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs and artists-and concluded that there are 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 have learned how to change their prototype ideas in systematic ways to reflect feedback and the constraints of reality. Through surprising and compelling stories, the authors show how readers can adopt their five patterns of thinking and use it to develop world-changing ideas. From the WHO's first major breakthrough in treating the Ebola virus, to the balloonist Betrand Piccard's first circumnavigation of the Earth without using fuel, and a British inventor's device that creates electrical power from human footsteps, ALIEN Thinking can help any of us find innovative solutions to the most difficult problems.