The four species are things you and others think but dare not say; things you say but don’t mean; things you feel but can’t name; and things you do but do not realize
Campaign, in partnership with Penguin Business,
Campaign’s commercial editor Suzanne Bidlake, caught up with Cyril Bouquet and Michael Wade. Together, along with Jean-Louis Barsoux, the professors of innovation and strategy have just published
Alien Thinking: How to Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life.
The book takes a fresh look at what enables innovators to make leaps of creative genius and how the rest of us can adopt this style of thinking. During the virtual session, Bouquet and Wade outlined the core principles of Alien Thinking and shared practical tips for professionals looking to apply this to their own work.
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Melinda Rolfs’ innovation journey began in 2014 the year her attention was first drawn to charitable giving. While working at Mastercard Advisors, the company’s consulting arm, she observed that “there seemed to be one major natural disaster after another. And in our offices there was one of those big screen TVs with CNN on it, and I was just constantly seeing these images of people who had so little to begin with and had lost absolutely everything.” This caused her to wonder what Mastercard could do to help the organizations providing relief. After reflecting on the problem, she stepped back to get a wider view of what her company could do with the resources at its disposal.
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Being an expert navigator is the key to innovation success
Innovators must prepare for their journey like adventurers: studying the conditions and being prepared to respond to dynamic elements along their path.
Photograph by Klaus Vedfelt
Whenever Swiss explorer Sarah Marquis tells people about her newest expedition, she gets the same reaction: “You’re crazy!” If she listened to these people, she’d cease to explore at all.
Marquis is an adventurer who’s spent much of her adult life trekking solo through some of the world’s most forbidding regions, from deserts to jungles to mountain ranges, living off the land and blazing her own trails. In 2014, she was named Adventurer of the Year by the National Geographic Society. Her experiences underline the importance of navigation when venturing into the unknown.