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