Playful Innovation, Part 1

As Kes said in a previous post, combinatory play is one of the most important mental skills to develop for creativity and innovation. On a basic level, combinatory play involves combining 2 or more concepts together to form new connections and ideas. Albert Einstein once said, “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” But long before Einstein discussed it, Gutenberg used combinatory play in practice, combining the ideas of a wine press, coin punch, and die stamps to invent the printing press.

Let’s look at how to actively use combinatory play to generate new, useful ideas. Starting with a simple example, we’ll combine 2 words. The words I’ve selected for this example are “Maze” and “Story”, which happen to appear in our ThinkCube Idea Library.

First, you always want to break down the concept (or word in this case) into its properties, related terms, and other meanings. This can be done in your head or on paper. You might break down one of our example words, Story, as we’ve done with a mind map:

Once you’ve broken down both words in this fashion, there are a number of methods for combining. Below is a sampling of methods, ordered from simplest to most complex. The best ideas often come from the complex techniques, but don’t dismiss a simple method that could lead to a breakthrough idea! In addition to describing each method, I’ve provided examples using our sample cards, Maze and Story.

1. Conceptual Mapping – combining compatible properties of 2 concepts.
        Example: A story that includes traversing a maze.
        Example: A story of a famous maze.

2. Property Mapping – Taking a single property from one concept and combining it with another concept; this includes incompatible properties.
        Example: Twisty plot of a story.
        Example: The story of a building that is a maze.

3. Relationship Mapping – Combining 2 concepts through a relationship or related term.
        Example: Using Adventure as the relationship – An adventure story where a maze has to be solved by the hero.

4. Structural Mapping - Mapping structural elements or patterns from one concept to another.
        Example: The story is a complex maze of interacting story elements i.e. text based adventure game
        Example: The Maze’s structure is created in the white-space of the story in a book

In Part 2 on combinatory play, we'll practice these basic skills on a collection of more complex ideas.