Out of bounds: Cross-industry innovation based on analogies

Abstract

Individual and collective creativity are vital preconditions for new ideas in the early phase of the innovation process, and therefore, for any physical product development activities. The cross-industry innovation process is an approach effective at stimulating creativity and making systematic use of already existing solutions from other applications or industries in order to develop entirely new ideas. Analogical thinking is a creative method applied to a problem that needs a solution and takes place if a familiar problem is used to solve a novel problem of the same type. Near analogies are much easier to identify than far analogies, as near analogies often entail obvious surface similarities. However, the combination of more distant pieces of knowledge, such as structural similarities, often results in a higher degree of novelty. Four real-life cases demonstrate how cross-industry innovation has been applied successfully for the development of technological breakthroughs and radical innovations.