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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS144

The key to using the technique at a business process level is to identify
clearly the essence of the process which you wish to transfer out or
transfer in. Then you should use your divergent thinking skills,
whether through free association, mind-mapping or brainstorming, to
generate ideas for the destination or source of the appropriate analogies.

transferring sub-systems and components Analogies

can sometimes be usefully applied to sub-systems or major attributes of
the overall problem or opportunity.

When Edison’s inventors were developing the light bulb, for example,
they encountered the problem of the experimental bulbs continually
falling out of their fixtures. One day a technician made the analogy
between the thread cap which secured a kerosene bottle and the light-
fixture problem. He mocked up the thread cap solution, discovered that
it worked, and the so-called Edison Screw design has not changed
since.

recognising the moment Professional footballer Craig Johnston
reports how during his playing days he could not feel any tangible
benefit of the new materials which certain manufacturers had
incorporated into their football boots in order to improve their feel and
touch. It was only later that his chance use of an analogy, and his
immediate realisation of the powerful insight which the analogy
revealed, led to a major breakthrough. As he put it:

‘Years later I was coaching kids in Australia and I was telling them that they
had to grip and bite into the ball like a table tennis bat to swerve it. “That’s
fine Mr Johnston,” they said, “but our boots are made of leather and not
rubber, it’s raining and they are slippery.” I went home and took the rubber
off a table tennis bat and stuck it on my boots with superglue. Immediately I
went outside again and kicked the ball, I could hear a squeak when the
rubber engaged with the polyurethane of the ball.’111

everything and anything goes Medical engineering and children’s
toys would seem to make unlikely bedfellows, but in the world of
analogical thinking, everything and anything goes.

Boston-based invention factory Design Continuum was involved in
creating an innovative medical product for cleaning wounds with a
flow of saline solution. Engineers made the analogy between the
pressured flow mechanism of the desired medical product and battery-