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From Newscan’s Above the
Fold” Worth Thinking About: Analogies (And Where They
Lead) "The raw
materials for the next breakthrough technology may already be here, but they
are certainly not in a nice box with a big label, a plastic window, and
assembly instructions. Those technologies do exist, but we see them coming for
decades before they hit the market: the integrated cellphone/PDA/camera/MP3
player, the affordable flat-screen television, the downloadable movie, the
flying car. No, the raw materials for breakthrough technologies will come in
unexpected forms -- the people, the ideas, and the objects will come dressed in
other uses, other meanings, and other relationships. "Untangling these
existing resources from their current context and putting them together in new
ways requires thinking by analogy. It means constantly asking how things are
the same. It's easy to point out how things are different; we do it every day
in order to decide where to focus our attention and energy. Who we talk to and
who we do not, which articles we read and which we ignore -- these are
difference-driven choices. And difference-driven choices are, by nature,
defensive. It would take two hours to read the paper every morning (and why
stop at just one paper?). But every time a manager dismisses an idea that works
somewhere else because it's a different industry, a different customer, a
different material -- that's also a difference-driven choice. The best ideas
won't come looking like they're just right. Fred Stratton, the CEO of Briggs
& Stratton, once said that genius lay in the ability to see how two things
that nobody else sees as related *are* related. This ability to make distant
analogies unlocks a world of potential. And it's all a matter of looking for
how things are the same, not for how they are different. * See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1578519047/...
for "How
Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate"
by Andrew Hargadon -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all
revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.) |
