Creative Change by Jennifer Mueller

Author:Jennifer Mueller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Aha Strategies: Combination

Combination is another useful aha strategy. By using a combination, George Lucas would have had the option to sell Star Wars using just two words: space Western. As noted in Table 1, a combination is one cue people use to determine whether something is creative. Like analogies, combinations serve to give your listener a comparison point. But instead of noting that one thing is like the other—like an analogy—combinations serve to emphasize the new element that is created by combining two things that are usually not seen together.

Like analogies, combinations give the listener a creative experience by providing him with the building blocks to quickly and efficiently understand the distinctive use for a given idea. When we quickly understand something and see connections between things that were not apparent before, this can feel like an aha or insight to the listener.

Remember the story of Steve Sasson, the Kodak engineer who invented the digital camera in the early 1970s? This story is so famous in part because of its extreme irony. Executives at Kodak failed to adopt digital technology even though it was invented at Kodak—a decision that is believed to have directly led to Kodak’s bankruptcy in 2009.

You might think this is an example of a bias against creativity. I did too. But when I read the details of how digital technology was first pitched to Kodak’s executives, I realized there was another possible explanation for Kodak’s odd decision to table that very creative idea.

When Steve Sasson attempted to sell the idea for the first digital camera to executives back in the early 1970s, he used a combination aha strategy to describe it. He told executives to “think of it as an HP calculator with a lens.”

Would this combination sell you?

For me a Hewlett-Packard calculator evoked the image of something complicated and cumbersome, and it had nothing to do with recording memories and more to do with recording data. But, of course, this is probably because I’m not an engineer. Perhaps, if I were an engineer, I would have liked this combination. An engineer would probably understand the kind of technology used to make powerful HP calculators and see how they might be combined with a lens to make a totally revolutionary new camera. In other words, the analogy of a calculator with a lens can tell you how the technology works, but it tells you less about the problem it helps consumers or executives solve.

Executives wondered why anyone would ever want to look at their photos on a television set. This was because Steve Sasson’s first demonstration of the digital camera was to take a picture of all the executives in the conference room who sat waiting to see the technology in action. It took only a fraction of a second to capture the image, but it took over twenty seconds to transfer the image onto a cassette tape, and another thirty seconds to load up the low-quality (100 pixel x 100 pixel) black-and-white image on a television set.

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