As academics go, Bill Duggan is refreshingly down-to-earth. An associate professor of management at Columbia Business School in New York, he specialises in what he calls “strategic intuition”.

Or, as he elucidates: “How do good ideas form in your mind? It’s certainly not in the brainstorming meeting scheduled for 2.30.”

When you ask people when they have their best ideas, he says, the answer is often in the middle of the night, in the shower, or when stuck in a traffic jam. And it is ideas creation that intrigues Prof Duggan.

He relies on the latest brain research that has been enabled by MRI technology, which reveals that there are actually three different types of intuition: ordinary, expert, and strategic. Ordinary intuition is a gut instinct; expert intuition is snap judgments based on previous experience – a professional footballer knows where a ball will land when he kicks it, for example; but it is the third kind, strategic intuition, in which he is most interested.

Strategic intuition is not a vague feeling, nor a reaction, but a flash of insight that solves a problem you may have been pondering for months. So how do you teach yourself to be strategically intuitive?

Prof Duggan has come up with a four-point description of how strategic intuition works. To begin with, you store information over time in the “shelves” in the brain. Second, you relax or clear your mind – “presence of mind”, he calls this. Then different pieces of information selectively move together in your mind to form a flash of insight. Fourth, resolution to act propels you forward.

The most difficult part of the process is achieving “presence of mind” he says, though this is a technique often used in eastern religions, for example in meditation or yoga.

The implications of the theory are that there is nothing new, he says. He cites examples of several companies that have come up with strategies, such as Starbucks coffee shops. The founders of the chain acknowledge that the idea came in Italy over a cup of coffee in one of the many local espresso bars. Starbucks adapted that concept to the US market and the rest, as they say, is history.

The idea that there is nothing new is both unnerving and liberating, he says. And there are clear ways to apply the theory to the corporate world.

For example, if a company has a problem to solve, then one way to look at it would be first to ask: has any other company in the world solved part of this problem? It is a strategy that has been used to great effect in GE, he says. “It overturns the conventional notion of strategy.”

He also proposes the idea of “reverse brainstorming” – people in the meeting identify the problem and then go away for a period of time to allow strategic intuition to work – often when they least expect it. “When brainstorming works, it is when someone has brought an idea into the meeting,” he says; the idea was not generated in the meeting, as often supposed.

On an individual level he points out that most negative emotions are caused by the frustration of not reaching a target or goal. “You have to give up your goal to see what you have to do,” says Prof Duggan. “It’s a discipline of the mind.” By following the steps to achieve strategic intuition, you can turn negative emotions into developing a strategy for your personal as well as professional life, he believes.

He says this is particularly true in a country such as the US, where students are often taught that if they work hard enough they can achieve anything they want. This is patently untrue, he points out. His route he describes as a “pragmatic theory of achievement”.

With a true sense of academic integrity, Prof Duggan willingly concedes that his concept of strategic intuition is not new either. “I didn’t invent it; I stole it.” In fact, he says he stole it from Napoleon Bonaparte, France’s most famous military leader and from Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote the classic military strategy about Napoleon, On War.

According to Prof Duggan, Napoleon had flashes of inspiration or strategic intuition, which he calls Napoleon’s glance, or coup d’oeil. He even goes as far as to point out that the word “strategy” entered the English language in 1810, when Napoleon’s success as a battlefield general made him emperor of Europe.

Indeed, the great military strategists from ancient to modern time, as well as business and social leaders, demonstrated this strategic intuition, says Prof Duggan. “Take a close look at great heroes of history and you see that they’re all very different, except for one thing: they’re all great strategists,” he writes in the opening paragraph of Napoleon’s Glance: The Secret of Strategy, published in 2002.

A year later Prof Duggan published The Art of What Works: How Success Really Happens and this year he will publish his third book, Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, which will be published in November. The book is a first for Columbia Business School as it is the first book to be published under the business school’s own imprint.

Prof Duggan’s theories are certainly proving popular. In spring 2007 his course was the highest rated by Columbia students of all 218 courses on the menu that semester.

In the spring he will be teaching his course again to MBA and Executive MBA students with shorter versions of the course taught on non-degree executive education custom and open enrolment programmes.

Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, published November 2 by Columbia Business School Publishing (http://columbiapress.typepad.com/strategic_intuition)