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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS138

could usefully apply that to Y.’ The exploration of the similarities can
be a tremendous spur to generating ideas and to finding pre-existing
solutions which have been created in other areas.

Once you have spotted a really good analogy, you often wonder how
you missed it in the first place. You can take heart from the fact that
steam engines had been used in mines for 75 years before Robert Fulton
and others saw the analogy between their usage underground and as a
means to propel boats. From this perception, they developed the first
commercial steamboat.

‘a minor invention every ten days’ Thomas Edison is generally

credited with founding the original ideas factory, precursor to such
organisations as IDEO. A feature of many inventions created at Edison’s
Menlo Park Research and Development base in New Jersey was that they
used old materials, ideas or objects in new ways. The record player, for
example, drew on analogies with existing technology in the fields of
telephones, electric motors and telegraphs. The power of this technique
among others allowed Edison to deliver on his promise of a ‘minor
invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so’.107

applying old ideas to solve new problems Analogies represent a

powerful way of achieving different perspectives either on an overall
opportunity or problem or on sub-systems or processes within them.
Analogies can help you break away from your conventional routines, self-
imposed constraints and ‘mental stuckness’. Analogies can create links
between opportunities in one type of business or area of activity and a
proven solution in another. Analogical thinking allows old ideas to
become effective solutions to new problems.

analogies can help you break away from
your conventional routines, self-imposed
constraints and ‘mental stuckness’

Analogies can help in every area of life. A famous (and very thin) actor
playing Shakespeare’s larger-than-life character Falstaff observed that
his infant son waddled in exactly the fashion that the actor wanted
Falstaff to move. Realising that wearing nappies gave his son no option
but to waddle, the actor bound his own legs in bulky cloth before each
performance in order to achieve the Falstaff swagger.