Leveraging Alien Thinking: Exclusive Interview with Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade

For the past decade, Cyril BouquetJean-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.

Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey!

In a time when uncertainty reigns, the fear of being disrupted can brutally hurt any business. Responsible leaders who dare to anticipate disruption and take steps to self-inflict it to their organization in a smart and controlled way are best positioned for the future.

Observation Grounds Collaborative Innovation

The practice of collaborative innovation starts with observation: the discipline to see and grasp the nature of the work, the end user’s environment, or the world at large. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores how people who lead their organization’s collaborative innovation practice can reinforce community members’ observational skills.

Making Innovation a Systemic Capability

For innovation to become a core competence and a tangible cultural value, there has to be a substantial degree of internal consistency between processes, metrics, reward structures, rhetoric, and top management behavior. But it is precisely this synchronicity that is lacking inside most companies, says Rowan Gibson.