You are currently browsing the Business Analogy Blog weblog archives for August, 2007.
August 13, 2007 by Frank Chen.
The recent subprime mortgage crisis has enticed many people to think about the difficult issues in the residential mortgage business and seek a better solution. Today, Mark Cuban just proposed such a radical, creative idea in his blog entry: “Solution for the Real Estate Market ? Take Your House Public ?”
Mark Cuban, of course, is the well-known, highly-successful entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks who has also been known as one with many ideas. While he admits in his blog that he has no direct knowledge and does not understand the details of the real estate business, he was able to come up with this very original idea of treating your house as a public company so that it can be publicly financed and traded; just like selling stocks in a company. In a short proposal, he has taken an approach, selling stocks to the public, that has already worked in one industry and applied it to a completely different industry, the real estate industry. Not only is the new idea easily digested by the readers, as evidenced by the comments to the blog article. He can also write about the idea easily because he can use languages that are already know in the financial industry to explain the new idea.
This is a prime example of how one industry’s approach can be applied analogically to another industry, resulting in what most people would consider as a radical and creative solution to an age old problem. What is also interesting is that the comments on the idea showed how easily readers not only easily grasp the gist of the idea but that they can also fill in the details and even suggest implementation schemes.
The more interesting question for us is this: Does it take a very unique thinker such as Mark Cuban to come up with such an idea? Or, can any one else think of it? One reader, Jeff Lewis, wrote in the comments that this was already thought of by Drew Myers in his blog: Virtual Housing Stock Market - Zillow API Idea #1 . So, once the analogy is invoked, it can seem quite obvious when in fact, it was not. It took Cuban and Myers who purposely invoked the analogy to make the solution seem real and workable. We believe that is the characteristics of a structured analogy process.
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