Analogical Thinking for Generation of Innovative Ideas: An Exploratory Study of Influential Factors

Introduction Despite their tremendous contribution to technological or theoretical innovation, academic institutions have been criticized for being insensitive to the rapid changes in the real world; moreover, they neglect the realities (Kogan, 2000; Minogue, 1973). In response to these criticisms and social needs, in the last few decades, a number of research centers and departments have been founded, focusing on new idea generation as a strategy for coping with social changes. In response to the increasing needs for facilitating generation of new ideas, many academic institutions provide educational programs promoting innovative idea generation. Definitely, innovative ideas allow us to solve complex problems that cannot be solved by traditional, routine, or common methods. Creating novel solutions to problems has fascinated many researchers in diverse disciplines. There is a wide range of approaches in perspective of cognitive, clinical, social, organizational, educational, historical, cultural, managerial, and personal areas. In spite of the tremendous amount of work on innovation, we still lack understanding of how to evaluate innovative ideas and what kinds of thinking processes encourage innovativeness. This paper proposes an effective evaluation method for assessing new ideas, as well as identifying factors that enable generation of appropriate ideas, focusing on idea generation using analogical thinking. In order to fulfil the objectives of this research, it is important to establish theoretical backgrounds by reviewing relevant studies on analogical thinking and thinking process to develop an effective evaluation method. More importantly, this study empirically investigates factors influencing generation of innovative ideas with data collected from four workshops. Analogical Thinking for Idea Generation To some extent, everyone uses analogies as a thinking mechanism in daily life (Holyoak & Thagard, 1996). Analogical thinking is the cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the source) to another one (the target). Welling (2007) defines analogical thinking as such that "implies the transposition of a conceptual structure from one habitual context to another innovative context", where "the abstract relationship between the elements of one situation is similar to those found in the innovative context" (p.168). Glynn, Britton, Semrud-Clikeman & Muth (1989) defined analogy as serving an explanatory function when it puts new concepts and principles into familiar terms. Analogy serves a creative function when it stimulates solutions of existing problems, identification of new problems, and generation of hypotheses. Analogical Thinking for Creative Problem Solving Numerous previous studies have supported the idea that analogical thinking plays a central role in creative idea generation because it can foster insights into new domains by analogizing to prior knowledge (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Gentner et al., 1997; Hesse, 1966; Holyoak & Thagard, 1989; Koestler, 1964; Perkins, 1997). Boden (1994) stated that creativity in psychological theory needs to describe how analogical thinking works. Clement (2008) examined sources of creative scientific theory formation in the domain of non-formal reasoning. He observed that analogies are frequently used by scientists in problem solving. Gick and Holyoak (1980) conducted five experiments with university students, having them solve a radiation problem, the same problem used in Duncker's (1945) original experiment. In one of their experiments, 27 subjects were given a story analogy and two irrelevant stories before they were presented with the problem to be solved. Meanwhile, twelve of them were instructed to use those story analogies to solve the radiation problem; but in the other group, fifteen subjects were not given any hint to utilize those story analogies for problem solving. …