Summary
The researchers begin by touting the benefits of analogies. Since finding analogies is difficult, they developed a mechanism where underlying structure of problems could be identified. For this purpose they leveraged crowdsourcing. They assigned problems for the participants and tasked them to find analogous ideas online. Their research outcomes showed that people are more likely to solutions that share surface features with the problem if the participants receive semantic cues. Participants that were given a schema were more likely to find far-analogs. In another experiment, the researchers determined that the use of schemas led to far more higher-rated solutions.
Reflection
The results of this research seemed to make sense since when given a schema, the participants were not fixated on a particular domain and instead were more open to different ideas thus fostering their levels of creativity. It also made sense that given a set of features, the participants are more likely to find near analogies than participants that are not provided such cues. These cues are likely to guide participants towards a certain domain and it would be difficult for them to think outside this domain.I did have one concern that all the solutions were rated by only two people. I felt a limited number of judges could skew the results of what would generally be considered a good or a bad solution.
This research project shares some similarities with my own. The researchers of this paper are interested in determining the underlying structure of problems by using crowdsourcing while I am interested in being able to use crowdsourcing to outline a cohesive, organized document that structures course content in a meaningful, easy to digest form thus implicitly tasking the participants to define the underlying structure of the course content.
As the researchers themselves admitted, the scope of the research was centered around product design, I would’ve been interested in learning if such a similar design can be used to design process improvements and new management techniques. For example, Chipotle had a newer process design for selling burritos that I haven’t seen before (perhaps in a school cafeteria) and led partly to their success thus underlying the importance of process improvements. Clearly the designers of this process for their restaurant selected a near-analogy, i.e. a school cafeteria and were able to drive innovation in the restaurant business. I have since seen other restaurants copy this process design such as &Pizza.
I always enjoy research papers that are designed to foster creativity since I find creativity to be a pretty difficult concept to control. This research was also interesting for me since it has a lot of real-world and industrial applications. I’ve typically imagined complex problems in simpler terms by using analogies to make sense of the structure and this research project showed how doing so could be beneficial to develop creative solutions. It also allowed me to learn about a certain level of steps that I can introduce and leverage in order to solve problems that require creativity.