A third way to recall new information that might be relevant to the problem is to form combinations. The escalator is actually one of my favorite examples of this. So, it turns out, elevators were long in use and apparently were commercially widespread by about 1850's. So you started to see tall towers being built because you had elevators by the 1850's. Right. So, was there a combination that resulted in the elevator becoming the escalator? Yeah. That was the insight. That was the insight, it was an elevator for stairs. Okay. Right? And that was the combination that led to that invention. Right. So rather than elevating a platform, we could combine a staircase with the technology they were using to lift the elevator, and there you have it. And you got an escalator, but that was 50 years later in about 1900. And it's still present in the word, right? So elevator, escalator, they sound a little bit alike. What's the difference? Well, stairs is a German word, and they chose the Latin form, scala. So esca-later, right? Elevator, right? So we need more German and Italian people collaborate, is that what we're getting into? Right. So form a combination in order to generate an idea that then turned into an invention, an escalator. So the role of a combination is to bring information into the perspective that can then interact with what's already there to produce something that's different, and so, change the course of the story. So, let's see. How about incubators? Right, yeah. Well, that's an interesting story in which combinations actually played a huge role in moving creativity forward. The real problem there was that in developing countries, there's a problem with infant mortality. Just sending a $40,000 incubator over there only works for a while until it breaks, and then what do you do? There's no sophisticated inventory of parts that you can use to repair this complex piece of machinery. Right. Or the sophisticated repair person with all that training to do it, right? So what do you do? Do you not have incubators? Yeah. That's probably not a good deal. So what did they actually end up doing? This story that I heard was about realizing, well, wait a minute, there are a bunch of mechanical things that do seem to work and get repaired around here, namely cars. So, okay, we can keep the the basket part of the incubator, but how can we have a warming function that runs off of the machinery of the cars? So you have this car part-incubator combination. And you make these Frankenstein monster sort of hybrid machine. Right. And not only are there the parts available but there are plenty of experts that can repair those cars. Yeah. So I think it was a headlight for the warmth and then the fan to blow it all around. And battery power to keep it running. And a car battery. And there you are. Yeah. And now, you've got an incubator and we have a lot more healthy babies. There are three different types of combinations. A combination is more than just bringing two ideas to mind at the same time. For example, to use a simple example from Ed Waznitsky, one of the scholars who worked extensively on combinations. Truck soap could mean soap for washing trucks. This is a kind of combination in which there is some scenario that links the two concepts together. Truck soaps might then be contrasted with, say, dish soap or hand soap. Truck soap could also mean soap that is shaped like a truck. This kind of combination takes a property from one item and maps it onto the other item. Truck soap, in this sense, might be contrasted with, say, shell soap, soap shaped like a shell, or zebra soap. Finally, there are blends that integrate aspects of both items in complex ways like the car part incubators. So how do we find combinations? Unfortunately, unlike everything else we're discussing in this module where we have drawn on scientific research to guide our analysis and make recommendations to you, there is actually no scientific research on how to generate or identify promising combinations. There are a great many suggestions in the popular press about generating combinations, but we have really no certainty about how effective they really are. For example, there are many recommendations to use random words or picture generators, or to flip through dictionaries. We're pretty skeptical, though, of the efficiency of that approach. Another common idea is to make a table with different kinds of things for the rows and columns. And then maybe, say, leading products and types of consumers or types of technologies, and then you just look at the intersections in the table and see if there are empty cells that sound promising. It's at least systematic. But the best evidence we have is to consider seeming opposites, maybe I don't know, affordable luxury or rugged luxury, something like that. There is some evidence that these kinds of combinations of oppositions tend to be particularly fruitful for generating creative ideas. And there is some evidence that considering oppositions generally tends to foster creative idea generation. We spoke about opposites already when we thought about re-categorization. So, considering seeming opposites and then trying to blend them together could be a useful approach to generating interesting combinations. There is so much evidence that combinations are a way to generate new interpretations that we can't just ignore it as a tool for creativity. Just because the research literature has yet to give us a clear pattern on how to generate good combinations, shouldn't stop us from thinking about it as a possible tool. Combination is often discussed as a route to creativity but it's not really well understood. Still, considering how oppositions can combine to yield new blends is clearly an avenue for changing our perspectives or building new ones.
