FOR THE PAST DECADE, the authors 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—Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation, and Navigation—to 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 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 and find innovative solutions to the most difficult problems.

Cyril Bouquet and Michael Wade are professors of innovation and strategy at IMD. Wade also holds the Cicsco chair in digital business transformation and has published nine books. Jean-Louis Barsoux is a research professor at IMD and the coauthor of several books on management, including the award-winning Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome.