IDEA ENGINEER

The purpose of the research described in this paper is to improve the understanding of the analogy technique for generating ideas, in particular for business applications. There has been very little research done on this topic, and thus hardly any advice is available for innovation managers and marketers, who rely on good ideas to achieve their objectives. Our goal is to provide concrete guidelines to practitioners for improving the effectiveness of the analogy technique... We have created a model that distinguishes between two classes of stimuli (concrete and abstract) that are used to generate analogies and two classes of analogy (near and far) that can be used to inspire ideas. We hypothesize that abstract stimuli will lead to more far analogies and that far analogies will lead to a larger number of good ideas. We performed an experiment to obtain evidence for these hypotheses in which subjects were asked to come up with solutions for a simple marketing task using both concrete and..

Primary location: Berlin Germany