Introduction and How Fusion Can Help You

Bringing in ideas from analogous fields turns out to be a potential source of radical innovation. When you ’ re working on a problem and you pool insights from analogous areas, you ’ re likely to get significantly greater novelty in the proposed solutions, for two rea-sons: People versed in analogous fields can draw on different pools of knowledge, and they ’ re not mentally constrained by existing, “ known ” solutions to the problem in the tar-get field. The greater the distance between the problem and the analogous field, the greater the novelty of the solutions . . . consider our recent study in which we recruited hundreds of roofers, carpenters, and inline skaters to contribute their insights to the problem of workers ’ reluctance to use safety gear because of discomfort. . . . Each group was significantly better at thinking of novel solutions for the other fields than for its own.