‘Check out this list of thirty million unfuckable men in technology.’ –Paul Ford
Imagine a team at a ski company that’s faced with a big problem: When skiers make sharp turns at high speeds, the edges of their skis lift from the snow, causing the skiers to sometimes lose control. The team needed to lessen the vibrations of its skis. But how? Eventually, they found a great solution in an unlikely place: the music industry. In some violins, they discovered, there’s a special layer — a metal grid — that helps to stabilize the instrument, and reduce unwanted vibrations. Problem solved. The ski company adapted the metal grid idea into its ski design. This type of solution is called an analogous solution, and it’s more common than you may think. In fact, I’d estimate that nearly 90% of new solutions are really just adaptations from solutions that already exist — and they’re often taken from fields outside the problem solver’s expertise.
Analogous solutions are extremely beneficial to businesses because they reduce time to market, and they can get stalled projects moving again. But for a long time they weren’t easy to find. If you didn’t accidentally happen upon a solution, you were simply out of luck.
This is why I wanted to develop a system that could make accidental discoveries a more predictable and regular occurrence […] which resulted in Analogy Finder, a program that mines the U.S. Patent Database for analogous solutions.
