Opening up the Solution Space: The Role of Analogical Thinking for Breakthrough Product Innovation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the approach of analogical thinking for product innovation. We collected data on projects from four engineering firms where analogical thinking was successfully applied for the development of breakthrough innovations. Results show that abstracting the problem by in-depth technical and contextual analysis is pivotal when searching for analogical solutions. Furthermore, the chances of identifying highly novel analogous solutions are increased if the problem is abstracted to the level of its structural similarities to other settings. We also found that the identification of structural similarities is supported when firms not only rely on the cognitive abilities of the individual but also employ an active search based on abstract search terms. Based on these insights, we propose a process model for the development of product innovations by means of analogical thinking.

The Role of Sketching States in the Stimulation of Idea Generation: An Eye Movement Study

“…The increase was also observed by Agogué et al (2011), who named the uncommon stimuli expansive examples. Visual displays with structural similarities are reported to be superior to surface similarities (Gassmann & Zeschky, 2008). Multiple kinds of distant text stimuli involving emotional words (Nagai & Noguchi, 2003), high level general verbs (Chiu & Shu, 2007), incongruent words (Chiu & Shu, 2008), sound-symbolic words (Mougenot & Watanabe, 2011), text of non-obvious semantic meanings (Chiu & Shu, 2012), and text describing distant related objects (Gonçalves, Cardoso, & Badke-Schaub, 2012), are reported to enhance the creativity of ideas.…”

“…They open new knowledge domain (Agogué, Kazakçi, Weil, & Cassotti, 2011), build far connections (Gassmann & Zeschky, 2008), and elicit experience and emotion (Mougenot, Aucouturier, Yamanaka, & Watanabe, 2010). Multiple forms of stimuli involving textual description, SCAMPER question, visual display, and even sound are reported to be supportive (Lopez-Mesa, Mulet, Vidal, & Thompson, 2011;Mougenot & Watanabe, 2011;Purcell & Gero, 1992), although with different effects (Sarkar & Chakrabarti, 2008).…”

“…Various kinds of stimuli involving images, words, videos, and even sounds could be helpful in promoting design ideas (Chiu & Shu, 2007. The relevance of stimuli to design tasks matters; distant related and abstracted stimuli trigger more original ideas (Casakin, 2005;Gassmann & Zeschky, 2008). Researchers also found that the timing of stimuli affected sketching quality (Tseng, Moss, Cagan, & Kotovsky, 2008), and stimuli presented in multiple states of problem solving induced different solution rates (Moss, Kotovsky, & Cagan, 2011).…”

Broadening the scope of open innovation: past research, current state and future directions

“…In addition, there has been growing attention to the use of corporate venture capital and university-collaboration to get access to new, early stage technologies (Allen and Hevert, 2007;Gaba and Meyer, 2008;Markham et al, 2005;Becker and Gassmann, 2006;Waites and Dies, 2006). Moreover, user innovation, customer interaction and alliance networks have recently received a fair share of attention in the open innovation literature (Hienerth, 2006;Lettl, 2007;Lettl et al, 2006;Piller and Walcher, 2006;Gassmann and Zeschky, 2008;Van Rijswijk et al, 2008). In addition, a topic that can be seen as one of the foundations of the open innovation principles is the development of open source software (OSS).…”

Semi-Automated Questions as a Cognitive Stimulus in Idea Generation

“…In addition, CSS can help to manually search for inspiration or to get inspired by others. However, automated idea stimulation is rare and creativity techniques rely on manually generated stimuli from moderators or other group members [12,21,27,38,65]. Implementing and adding an ITsystem that automatically generates stimulating content to the idea process can enhance individual creativity by acting as an external stimulus [7,8,24].…”