How did history’s greatest innovators combine creativity with analytical tools to change the world? IMD Professors Cyril Bouquet and Michael Wade are here to help you develop ideas that really matter.
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.
They are the rebels with a cause, the curious integrators who are people-centred, trying to drive others to make sense of their worlds. They combine creative intelligence with whatever analytic tools are at their disposal, even when resources are constrained.
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 is built around five principals:
Attention – see the world with fresh eyes, look at the world to find problems that need to be solved and solutions that can be dramatically improved or revised. Determine what people actually care about.
Levitation – learning to step back to gain perspective.
Imagination – release your imagination, brainstorm questions not answers, defer judgement and instead encourage wild ideas, this will help you create breakthrough solutions.
Experimentation – test smarter to learn faster, turn a promising idea in to a workable solution that addresses a real need.
Navigation – learn how to deal with the external forces that can make or break your idea.
In this livestream talk, IMD Professors Cyril Bouquet and Michael Wade share insights and tools to help you develop ideas that will really matter.
