Note to Brilliant readers: I held off sending the Brilliant Report this week because I wanted to share with you the talk I gave today at the Sandbox Summit, a fantastic annual conference that brings together all kinds of people interested in kids, technology and learning. As the closing keynote speaker, I was asked to talk about the 2014 Summit's theme, "Innovation By Design." Here's an edited and condensed version of what I said to the attendees: 

I want to talk today about how we build bridges between old ideas and new ideas, between concepts that are close to home intellectually and those that are far afield. Because it is these bridges, these connections, that produce innovation.

There’s a popular notion that innovation arrives like a bolt out of the blue, as a radical departure from previous knowledge—when really, most new ideas are extensions, twists, variations on what’s come before. The skill of generating innovations is largely the skill of putting old things together in a new way, or looking at a familiar idea from a novel perspective, or using what we know already to understand something new.

I say “skill” because we don’t have to leave these encounters up to chance. We don’t have wait for lightning to strike. We can, right now, hone our ability to deployanalogies. Analogies—comparing one entity to another, apparently different entity—is one of the most powerful tools humans have for understanding our world and for generating new knowledge.

In their book Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, cognitive scientists Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard point out how many intellectual advances through the ages have been built upon analogies:

The first-century Roman architect Vitruvius compared the sound of actors’ voices in an amphitheater to the movement of water in a pool, the first of many thinkers to compare sound waves to water waves.

The seventeenth-century scientist William Gilbert compared the earth to a magnet, advancing knowledge of the earth’s gravitational force.

The eighteenth-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier compared respiration to combustion, clarifying how breathing turns oxygen into carbon dioxide.

Even the great nineteenth-century biologist, Charles Darwin, built his theory of evolution on an analogy between artificial selection—the deliberate mating of animals by breeders—to the natural selection that goes on in the wild.    

Analogies are still frequently used by scientists working today, as University of Maryland professor Kevin Dunbar discovered when he observed firsthand scientists working in four microbiology labs. Dunbar found that the scientists used as many as fifteen analogies in a one-hour laboratory meeting, and that the more successful labs employed more analogies in discussing their work.

Let’s look more closely at what is happening, conceptually, when we make an analogy. To read the rest of my talk, click here.