Leveraging Analogies, Pt 2

Over the weekend I remembered a relevant post-script to my post on analogies last week. This one sheds light on what kinds of analogies yield the biggest impact in terms of idea generation potential.

"In another experiment, Lovallo and his collaborator Ferdinand Dubin asked 150 business students to generate strategies to help the fictitious Mickey Company, which was struggling with its computer mouse business in Australia and China. After business students learned about the company's challenges, they were told to write down all the strategies they could think of to try to improve Mickey's position.

"Lovallo and Dubin gave some students one or more analogies in their instructions. (For example: 'The profile of Nike Inc. and McDonald's Corp. may be helpful to supplement your recommendations but should not limit them.") Other students got none. The students prompted with one analogy came up with more strategies than those given no analogies, and the students given multiple analogies came up with more strategies than those reminded only have one. And the more distant the analogy, the better it was for idea generation. Students who were appointed to Nike and McDonald's generated more strategic options than their peers who were reminded of computer companies Apple and Dell."

(This excerpt leverages Dave Epstein's "Range")

To recap:

Leveraging an analogy leads to more output than a generic prompt to come up with ideas;

Leveraging multiple analogies leads to more output than leveraging a single one does;

Leveraging distant analogies leads to more strategies than leveraging near analogies does.

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