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1374 : STEP TWO – GENERATING NEW IDEAS

Nesmith’s skill lay in perceiving how an underlying principle, the
essence of a process, could be transferred from one application to
another which was ‘similar but different’.

More recently, a senior Marks & Spencer director was wrestling with
how to improve the massively inefficient process of buttering
sandwiches by hand. When visiting a supplier who made bed sheets for
Marks & Spencer, the director noticed that the supplier was using a silk-
screen process to print patterns. Spotting the analogy, Martin van
Zwaneberg, then head of home services and food technology, initiated
an experiment to print butter on to cotton. As a result of this successful
experiment, Marks & Spencer now silk-screens butter on to its
sandwiches.106

The roll-call of analogically inspired products is impressive. Dietrich
was inspired to create the Pritt Stick glue dispenser by watching a
woman apply her lipstick; the roll-on deodorant was drawn from an
analogy with the ball-point pen; and an engineer’s ability to spot the
analogy between a beer can and a low-cost disposable photosensitive
drum contributed to the creation of the Canon Mini-Copier.

Clarence Birdseye, owner of an American produce business in the late
1890s, overturned the conventional business practice of the time of
never leaving the store. Instead, he travelled frequently and widely.
After observing the people of the Arctic preserving fresh fish and meat
in barrels of seawater quickly frozen by the Arctic temperatures,
Birdseye concluded that it was this rapid freezing in the extremely low
temperatures that made food retain freshness when thawed and cooked
months later. Birdseye saw how this principle could be applied to his
own business and brought the analogy home.

In 1923, with an investment of $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine
and cakes of ice, Birdseye invented and later perfected a system of
packing fresh food into waxed cardboard boxes and flash-freezing under
high pressure.

similar, but different There is nothing mysterious about

analogies. An analogy is a statement about how objects, persons,
situations or actions are similar in process or relationship to one
another.

You make an analogy when you perceive that A is like B, only different.
Perhaps you say to yourself: ‘That reminds me of X’ or ‘I can see how I