Biassociation for the Entrepreneurial Engineering Curriculum

Despite the apparent benefits of fostering creativity, the question largely remains at how to develop and deliver a curriculum that can stimulate such innovative thinking. Several models have developed on an attempt to ground creative thinking and its usage such as schema theory from Bartlett, Johansson's Medici Effect, Koestler's biassociation or Tom Kelley's faces of innovation. While the first three focused more on the structure and processes of innovation, Kelley's work took a more personal approach, defining several characters that play different roles in the creative process. Michael Michalko rebrands biassociation as "conceptual blending," but essentially works from the same base theory as Koestler. Thus, biassociation-the process of combining seemingly unrelated concepts-has quickly become the operating frontrunner of theories on creative conceptualization. Implemented traditionally in entrepreneurial practices, this paper summarizes the current state of art in biassociation and techniques to help students to operationalize the concept. This paper explores what are the implications and possibilities for biassociation in the classroom and what a curriculum with biassociation as its fulcrum might look like.