Page 77 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

ii ► 1 (III ‘V011iddif()W it il)CrilW I back t Ill I ler

I( ) I lc k,p, n station. A product development team from

A I las ( opco Roc Tec, a mining-equipment company

I ),IstiLl in Golden, Colorado, used analogies to develop /

achine that would both dig ore and load it onto

a conveyor belt. One of the members of the

problem-solving team was an entomologist.

He suggested the praying mantis as an

example. As it eats, it clutches food

between its forelegs and thrusts it

into its mouth. The result of this

analogy was the ROC 302, a large

tractor with shovels on each side

(like forelegs) that load ore onto a \

conveyor belt running through the

middle of the machine. 3 As these ex-

amples demonstrate, while in its simplest form an analogy

is a comparison of dissimilar entities, in many instances

analogies are fully developed comparisons, more intricate

and detailed than a metaphor or a simile.

Metaphors

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which two different uni-
verses of thought are linked by some point of similarity. In
the broadest sense of the term, all metaphors are simple analo-
gies, but not all analogies are metaphors. Typically, meta-
phors treat one thing as if it were something else so that a
resemblance that would not ordinarily be perceived is
pointed out. Examples include the idea drought, frozen
wages, the corporate battleground, liquid assets. Also: The
sergeant barks, an order, the cold wind cuts to the bone, the
road was a ribbon of moonlight. Metaphors have many uses
in creative endeavors. For example, they have been used in
sales to create new ways of viewing old realities. 4 Hiroo
Wantanabe, a project team leader for Honda, coined the fol-
lowing metaphor to describe his team's tremendous chal-
lenge: Theory of Automobile Evoluation, 'If a car could in-
deed evolve like a living organism, how should it evolve?'
he asked his team. This thought process eventually led them
to the very successful Honda City model.'