Cross-Pollination of Ideas

Part 3 of How to Creatively Solve Problems

In part 2 we were talking about brain patterns and the chairs pattern in particular. Read that first if you haven’t already…in fact, you really want to start with part 1

With that done, consider for a second all the myriad of other things, in addition to chairs, stored in your brain, ranging from the mundane to the profound, you have to marvel at the massive, massive number of concepts and interconnections a human brain is capable of. Those interconnections are where creativity lives.

In order to generate new ideas to solve some kind of problem, whether it be peace in the Middle East or which color scheme to paint your house, your brain needs to bring together some combination of existing patterns in a way that hasn’t existed before. (If the association that you needed already existed, you would already know the answer and there would be no problem). In other words, you have to cross pollinate two or more concepts.

An example can be found in the classic book on Silicon Valley start-up company strategy Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore. The problem he addressed was that of introducing a new technology product to the marketplace. Moore determined that a small group of early adopters could be counted on to try a company’s new tech. However the majority of the market would not be convinced by a few early adopters; those in the majority wanted to see that the majority was already using the start-up’s product — a chicken-and-egg problem. The issue seems insurmountable when you first encounter it.

Moore’s solution came about by cross-pollinating a strategy from World War II with start-up marketing. On D-Day, June 6th 1944, an overpowering number of Allied forces stormed, and captured the beaches of Normandy, which had relatively light Nazi defenses. From there the Allies took back a small area at a time, controlling a larger and larger amount of territory until the Nazis were defeated. This is how Moore proposed tackling the issue of introducing revolutionary products to a marketplace: Bring overwhelming forces to a very small market segment; establish a “beachhead” by becoming the dominant player in that sub-market; then widen your appeal by expanding into related sub-markets, one at a time, until you have a majority of the whole market. Self-driving vehicles may follow a path like this, with long-haul trucking being the initial market segment, or beachhead.

Notice that, on the surface, the D-Day operation has no obvious significance to selling high tech products. These were two concepts that Geoffrey Moore had in his brain, which he cross pollinated to come up with the basis of a best selling book.

It is not the only example of business borrowing from other fields to inform its operations. The Art of War, an ancient text by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tsu, has been recommended as a manual for companies battling competitors. Similarly the analogy of teams and teamwork is so often applied to business that it is practically forgotten that it was originally only used in sports.

Now that we have the pattern model for thinking about how thinking works, and we understand that cross-pollination of those patterns is where to find ideas, what do we do to make those highly unobvious associations? We’ll cover that in Part 4.