September 22, 2007 by Frank Chen.

This is an interesting post on using an analogy to obtain business insight:

http://swni.typepad.com/dispatches/2007/09/a-high-rate-of-.html

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September 21, 2007 by Frank Chen.

Without doubt, in the annals of human history, the invention of a new system of writing is definitively an example of radical innovation. There is an interesting story of how the Chinese writing system, consisting of square pictograms, were invented more than four thousand years ago. It was arguably the first historically-recorded example of bio-mimicry that resulted in an invention.

Like other cultures, ancient Chinese used strings and tied knots for recording dates and events. Later, they started to put  scratches in wooden pieces or carved signs on tortoise shells. These efforts, over millenniums, did not resulted in a clear system of writing until the time of the first Chinese king, Huang-ti. 

A court official, named “Changjie” was charged with the task of developing a system of words that can be used through the tribal kingdom that was ancient China. We can conjectured that he must have collected samples of writings that existed then and thought hard about coming up with a system. History recorded that Chngjie’s invention came to him when he was examining a tortoise shell that has been used for recording words. As he pondered, it occurred to him that there are natural patterns on the shell that can be grouped. Aha!  So the new system is a series of stylized patternes!

This bit of insight led to the invention of the Chinese system of characters that are analoguos in style to the patterns on top of a tortoise shell. In this case, indeed, the rest is history.

We can imagine that Changjie must have thought long and hard about what should have been the answer to his problem. Looking at the patterns on the shell gave him the inspiration. No, he did not copy the patterns. Instead, he copied the concept that a series of linked scribbles can represent a word. This was truly a conceptual analogical mapping example.

My telling of this story is to illustrate that analogical mapping is a most natural, human thinking process - even as ancient as a 4000 year old innovation.  Even till today, Changjie’s accomplishment is recognized by naming the new system of computerized Chinese input method after him. 

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September 14, 2007 by Cynthia Sifonis.

In PC Magazine (Vol 26, No.16) I came across an interesting analogy between the computer industry and the automobile industry.

Written by John Dvorak, he had the following to say:

“The computer industry is often compared with the automobile industry, but it has missed the entire “concept car” idea. Every so often one company or another will design cool concept computers that can wow the crowd, but in general this is not the norm.

What I find weird is that creating a jazzy futuristic machine just to play with ideas is a lot cheaper to do with computers than with cars. A concept car can cost millions of dollars to design and build, yet it’s an institution in the auto industry. In the computer business, a concept machine is seldom promoted to the general public. The closest we come to institutionalizing such a notion are the case-mod designs that individuals build. The equivalent in the auto industry is the hot rod or the custom car business.

With these thoughts in mind, I looked over what Intel has been up to recently with a number of futuristic performance claims, all of which lacked the auto-industry pizzazz. Imagine going to one of the major car shows and, instead of seeing cool new cars, just getting to see the motors. Sigh.”

Dvorak’s insightful comments are a beautiful example of how an analogy between industries can lead to innovative ideas.

Something that is an “institution” in one industry (i.e., concept cars in the automobile industry) can be turned into an groundbreaking innovation when ported into a different industry (i.e., concept computers in the computer industry).

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