Cyril Bouquet joins us to discuss "A.L.I.E.N. Thinking: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas." His book breaks down five keys to creating disruptive ideas called ALIEN Thinking: Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation, and Navigation.

Cyril's Background

Cyril is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD. Growing up, both of his parents were professors, but he had no desire to become one. Cyril had to do French military service, and one way to got about this was through civic service. Through his civic service, he fell in love with being a professor.

Cyril Bouquet was a professor in Canada and later came to teach at IMD in Switzerland. He has been an immigrant most of his life, to which he attributes a lot to his passion for innovation. He was raised in tropical islands, lived in France, Canada, and now lives in Switzerland. Through coming to different countries, Cyril has learned that there are many different ways to approaching the same situations.

Better Innovation with ALIEN Thinking

Through Cyril Bouquet's story, it is interesting to see how different parts of the world view things differently. This ties into the new book he co-authored called "A.L.I.E.N THINKING: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas."

A.L.I.E.N is an acronym for identifying the keys to being highly innovative. It is a metaphor that highlights the need to get rid of our previous assumptions. We have to think like an alien, coming from a different planet, or as I like to say, thinking outside of the box. The book explores the A.L.I.E.N acronym that applies to innovation in any field.

Firstly, the A stands for attention, or how you look at the world. Sometimes we need to zoom in or out and switch our focus. In the book, Cyril emphasizes not being too focused, as it can restrict your ability to come up with new ideas. There is a balance where you need to be engaged and concentrated while being attentive to the right things. If you want to develop an innovative concept, you need more fluidity than often taught. The L stands for levitation or stepping back, separating yourself, and expanding your understanding.

Imagination and the Loss of Creativity

The I stands for imagination composed of playing with ideas and putting things together. A few weeks ago, I did a show that talked about a study N.A.S.A. did on kids and adults using their creativity test. 98% of the kids under the age of 6 passed the test, while only 18% of the adults passed it. Much of the loss of imagination comes from schooling that teaches you to stay on specific paths.

Young kids are less afraid of what others think of them. They don't care what they look like and are okay being themselves. As they become older, they start to care more. As they grow older, conformity starts to creep in. This concept is the same when dealing with innovation creativity. The more we think ahead, the less we innovate as we become afraid to play with ideas.

Experimentation and Navigation

The E in A.L.I.E.N stands for Experimentation. The way we test ideas is often wrong, as we do it to prove we are correct. We use data to rationalize the story we have in mind and fail to learn from it. It is essential to be open to learning and discovery within the experimentation process.

The N stands for navigation or finding ways around things that are blocking innovation progress. Cyril believes this is the hardest part of innovation. It is because people often don't understand your idea. We often overestimate the support for our ideas that we will get.

Often killed immediately, most ideas scare people when they disrupt existing business models. In other words, the success of any innovation is very low. Innovators have to describe their ideas in a way that resonates with people for them to be successful. The language used to describe your innovation is so incredibly important.

If you want to keep up to date with what Cyril Bouquet is doing or grab a copy of the book, check out the website here.

About the Guest: Cyril Bouquet

Cyril Bouquet is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD, where he orchestrates all kinds of innovation journeys for companies that seek to create the future. He is the co-author of ALIEN THINKING: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas (PublicAffairs; March 16, 2021).

As a professor at IMD, Cyril is doing research that has gained significant recognition in the field. His Ph.D. dissertation won the Academy of International Business 2004 Richard Farmer Award. Since then, he's published one book "Building Global Mindsets" (2005), and several academic articles in the most prestigious academic journals, including Harvard Business Review, M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Management, and the Journal of Management Studies.

Have you noticed that there is a constant cycle of new product releases? Organizational quarterly results often drive these releases. Cars, smartphone devices, home automation products, applications all follow this pattern of release cycles. I believe the fear of being left behind is what draws people to upgrades. They don't want to pull out an old generation of a phone or drive an outdated car.

Fast Release Cycles

In most companies, product managers will make incremental changes while portraying them as revolutionary upgrades. They put minor innovations into releases to get customers to buy the upgraded version nine months later. Companies have made it a standard operating procedure to launch numerous releases of the same product with minor cosmetic changes.

One example of this comes by way of Canon's cameras. Canon has a top-rated camera called the Canon Rebel that came out in 1990. Between 1990 and 2004, Canon released eleven versions of the Rebel. New versions of the product came out in 92', 93', 96', and 99'. The subsequent three releases (2002, 2003, and 2004) went through two releases per year. Here, you can see Canon accelerating releases of the Rebel's next version on an annual basis.

Another example of an accelerating release cycle comes from the Apple iPod. From 2002-2007, there was a new release of the iPod every year. The iPhone updates at a similar rate.

While these are some common examples, these fast release cycles also occur in other industries. They can be attached to fashion, home appliances, automobiles, and various things besides consumer electronics.

Do Faster Release Cycles Hurt Innovation?

Inside organizations, innovators want to create revolutionary products. The pressure to pump up sales comes from shortening release cycles with recorded quarterly profits. Pumping up products becomes a drug that many organizations get hooked on. It conveys a false sense of innovation capability to shareholders and investors.

Organizations that get hung up on fast releases fail to make long-term investments into revolutionary products. They feed into the next release cycle, hurting innovation efforts along the way.

Here is a personal example of a product I was involved in that was negatively affected by fast release cycles. The product was the 2011 HP Touchpad, based on some ongoing tablet work. As the CTO, I pushed for the creation while leading the Palm acquisition's due diligence. After the 2011 HP Touchpad was released, the board of directors discontinued it seven weeks later.

Internal organizational fighting is what led to the ruin of the product. Proponents for traditional product release cycles were firmly anti-new products. They came out in force, preventing dollars from going to new products. They wanted the spending dumped into traditional HP laptop and printer products. These conventional products are low risk but don't add much value to products.

At this time, HP valued good quarterly numbers over long time growth and the transformation of lives. Ultimately, this mindset resulted in the death of many other innovative products.

Advice for Innovation Leaders

As an innovation leader, you need to avoid falling into this trap. Incremental changes to existing products are not innovation but artificial marketing. Following the discontinue of the Touchpad, I announced that I was leaving HP. Dealing with the innovation antibodies in this situation was very frustrating. While this case was extreme, this is often the reality of innovation efforts.

As we have seen, faster release schedules hurt innovation. The law of patience says that innovation takes longer than you think. Trying to force it into a release schedule is incrementalism, not innovation.

The law of resources says that you should not tie your resource commitment to a release or budget cycle. An organization that focuses on accelerating release cycles is not doing proper innovation. As an innovator, it is crucial to fight the urge to be like everyone else.

Wicked problems are problems that are extremely difficult or impossible to solve. The best example of a wicked problem comes from a project I did with the Department of Education.

Wicked Problems

This project aimed to innovate kindergarten through 12th-grade education in the U.S. We ran a series of workshops in our attempt to transform education. The project turned out to be an extremely frustrating endeavor. Looking back, I realize that this qualified as a wicked problem.

A wicked problem is something that is inconsistent and changes over time. People's opinions on the problem also change over time. The ecosystem of people interested in education, such as policymakers, teachers, unions, and students, have different opinions and think theirs are superior.

A wicked problem also has a sizeable economic burden or risk. If you mess up education, you impact a generation of people and how they compete in the marketplace. Entangled with other problems by nature, wicked problems are complex.

Challenges

Wicked problems can often be overwhelming due to their size and complexity. The complexity of the problems comes from these entanglements. For example, if you look at the poverty problem, it is linked to education and linked to nutrition.

Each wicked problem has a set of organizations that are trying to solve the problem. Some try to solve poverty, education, nutrition, economic disparity, etc., from their perspective. Each group believes their approach is the right one. This process becomes part of the overall challenge in finding innovative solutions to these wicked problems.

Wicked problems are unique, and everyone frames them differently. Other things that challenge the solving of wicked problems are restraints and limited resources. These can come in the form of laws and contracts and limited finances and time limits.

Wicked problems are never entirely solvable. The education problems today are just different than the issues that existed when I was in school.

Strategies and Keys to Success

There are two keys to success when finding innovative solutions to wicked problems. Firstly, there is multi-disciplinary collaboration. There need to be experts in many different fields involved in these efforts. If you want to solve education, you need parents, nutritionists, economists, educators, etc.

The second key to success in this area is to have perseverance. Wicked problems are never done and require continuous improvement.

There are a few strategies to tackling wicked problems. The first strategy is an authoritative strategy, which gives a group or individual the responsibility of making decisions. This process simplifies the complexity problem, but some perspectives of the problem are left out.

The second strategy is a competitive strategy that puts opposing points of view against each other. This way presents many different solutions but creates a confrontational environment that reduces knowledge sharing.

The third strategy is collaborative, which consists of getting people to discuss and share their knowledge. The con here is that a collaborative approach takes a lot of time. Remember, don't think about solving wicked problems. Instead, seek to find the proper intervention that will improve them and continue that cycle of improvement.

Summary

Let's recap the discussion on wicked problems. The first element to innovating wicked problems is to recognize that there is an adaptive vision. It's not about finding a solution but applying that intervention.

The second element is creating an idea-safe environment that brings people together. It is essential to experiment and try new ideas while encouraging social bonding.

The third element is to enable knowledge sharing. People often approach wicked problems with biases that don't help the situation. It's vital to encourage differences and frame them as strengths. One way to do this is to force face-to-face interaction. This type of interaction is the most beneficial for collaboration.

The last element is recognizing that execution is learning. Don't focus on timelines and blueprints when dealing with wicked problems. These things are often changing, so you need to be ready to adapt through each step you take.

Is creative thinking based on a born ability, or can you learn it like any other skill? Is it nature or nurture? There is research that argues both cases, and I believe you can do both. I would say that we are all born highly creative.

Creative Nature vs. Creative Nurture

Children use problem-solving and their imagination every day. Here's some insight into this creative transition from child to adult. In 1968 George Land tested 1,600 kids to analyze their creative transformation. He focused on three-five-year-old kids and used a creativity test developed by NASA. This test helped identify highly creative engineers, thinkers, and problem solvers. It had proven to be incredibly valuable in NASA's recruiting process.

George Land tested the same kids when they were five, ten, and fifteen years of age. 98% of the five-year-old kids passed the test, 30% of those same kids passed the test at ten years old, and 12% of them passed the test at fifteen years old.

Two hundred eighty thousand adults took the NASA creativity test, and only 2% of them passed. The result of the study was the realization that non-creative behavior is learned as people age.

Unlearning Non-Creative Behavior

Non-creative behaviors fall into two categories: rules and regulations. The educational model that we use today originated in the Industrial Revolution. The purpose of schooling during this time was to produce good workers who followed instructions.

The question then becomes, can you teach creative thinking? I believe you can teach and learn creative thinking. However, you cannot use traditional learning methods like lecturing, reading, testing, memorization, etc. There are many "creative thinking" courses out there that I would call traditional such as one-day courses, talking head on a YouTube video, or a "guru" speaking on stage.

When it comes to creative learning skills, you first must unlearn by breaking old habits and patterns. Intensify the breaking of old habits by creating new muscle memory. Getting out of the comfort zone is also a big part of this, and it starts with humility. People often come into my workshops with an ego problem stemming from prior successes. Ego is one of the most significant barriers that leaders have when trying to rediscover their creative thinking. Overall, it's an unlearning process, not a learning process.

Unlocking Creative Potential

You don't become a Marine by reading a book. Instead, you go through intense boot camp experiences. Likewise, you don't learn to be creative. You become creative from intense experiences. Becoming creative entails various challenges and tests that put you under stress. Remember the military model and how you can apply it to teaching and learning creative thinking skills.

You should also hang out with creative people that have experience because it creates community. In the Innovation Boot Camp course, we give those who complete the course a callsign— which signifies the experience they went through and achieved. The callsign is a symbol to wear. When we run into someone who has taken the course, we share that common experience of creating community.

The Innovation Boot Camp is a great way to unlearn bad behavior stemming from rules, regulations, and assumptions. The boot camp puts every student into a very intense experience. We start with a blank sheet of paper on Monday and a finished product to pitch on Friday.

As innovators, we should always ask ourselves what the unintended consequences of our inventions will be. Some unintentional things can be positive, but some can be very negative. Let's look at a list of past innovations that I would uninvent if I could.

The Invention of Robocalls

The first invention that I would like to uninvent is robocalls. These calls include anything from selling automobile maintenance contracts to various telemarketing campaigns. In our office, our employees get eight to twelve robocalls every day.

Robocalling is the result of telephone calls going digital and the creation of voice over IP. This technology opened up the door for the invention of robocalling. The inventors of voice-over IP did not think their invention would be this widely misused. Misuse of the technology has spread more widely as regulators haven't been able to keep up with it.

The Atomic Bomb, Speed Cameras, and Social Media

The second invention I would uninvent is the atomic bomb. Atomic energy has been very beneficial to society. The creation of the atomic bomb is an excellent example of the harmful use of good innovation. If I could, I'd keep using atomic sciences for medicine and energy but get rid of the bomb.

The next thing I would uninvent is speed cameras that clock your vehicle's speed and send you tickets. These have some positive uses, such as license plate tolls that mail a bill to your address and improved road safety.

The bad thing about the speed camera technology is that many third-party companies install cameras and split the toll money with the municipalities. With a third-party in the picture, it opens the door for many unethical practices for these companies.

The fourth technology I would uninvent is social media. I believe social media creates an amplification effect of similarities. Social media algorithms misuse and manipulate data and information and place things in your feed. I prefer to spend my time on LinkedIn and the Innovators Community, which are more professional and don't artificially put stuff in your feed.

Tobacco, Plastic, and other Chemical Weaponry

Number five on my list is tobacco, a hard one for me as the family on my grandmother's side were tobacco farmers in Kentucky. I remember helping with the tobacco harvest in the summers as a kid. The fundamental role of tobacco is damaging as it is addictive and bad for one's health. My mom was a heavy smoker, so I would love to get rid of tobacco if I could.

The sixth invention I would love to get rid of is chemical weaponry, which started with mustard gas before WW1. Many more dangerous weapons came about because of this invention. Now the world is forced to form treaties to deter abuses of these technologies.

The next thing I would love to get rid of is plastic. Plastic has had many positive uses, especially in healthcare. The early versions of plastic that never decompose are the real problems. Here's an example of an invention with unintended consequences. Innovators were encouraged to solve the problem and resulted in bio-degradable products that are very useful.

In the past, I've shared our work with Lakeside Fish Farm in Rwanda, the largest fish farm in the country. Rwanda has a stringent no-plastic policy. Packaging fish without plastic has proved a challenging task. As a result, there has been a lot of work done on creating alternative packaging that reduces the need for plastic.

Computer Viruses and Chemical Ingredients

Another unintended consequence I wish I could erase is the invention of computer viruses and malware. Many of you may not know that I was doing work around computer viruses and had some engagement with Dr. Fred Cohen in my early days. My work on computer viruses focused on cutting down illegal software copying. The intentions were good, but over time, they led to malware and other dangerous things.

The next on my list is the overuse of chemicals in foods. I've gotten into the habit of reading ingredient lists on the foods I eat and liquids I drink. When looking at the ingredients of food and drink, many chemicals' inclusions solely benefit the producer. These chemicals make foods last longer, cost less to produce, etc. One example is high-fructose corn syrup, a common replacement of sugar that is very unhealthy.

What Invention Would You Like to Uninvent?

For the tenth and final invention, I want the listeners to think of something they want to uninvent and add to the comments.