Analogical thinking

Now comes the moment of truth—actually applying the inventive principle to solve your technical contradiction. This requires good analogical thinking skills because you have to consider the identified inventive principles as a guide for coming up with a specific solution to your original specific problem, or technical contradiction. 

Several approaches to enantioselective synthesis have been taken, but the most efficient are those that use chiral catalysts to temporarily hold a substrate molecule in an unsymmetrical environment—exactly the same strateg)" that nature uses when catalyzing reactions with chiral enzymes. Whde in that unsymmetrical environment, the substrate may be more open tc reaction on one side than on another, leading to an excess of one enantiomeric product over another. As an analog, think about picking up a coffee mug in your... 

As an analogy, think of the following scenario You manufacture multiple locks and an only key for those locks then you distribute the locks to your friends but keep the only key for yourself. When one of your friends wants to send you a secret letter, she will put the letter in a box and lock the box with your lock. Once it is locked, even your friend no longer can open the box because she does not have the key for the lock and because you have the only key for the lock. Therefore the box can be delivered safely to you even if you use some untrusted third party (e.g., courier, postman) for delivery. Only you can open the box with the only key you keep. Conversely, if you want to send a secret letter to your friend, you put your letter in a box and lock it with your friend s lock. Once locked, even you cannot unlock the box because your friend has the only key for the box. Consequently you are assured that only your friend can read your secret letter. Even if the box is misdelivered to someone else, the content of your letter is still kept secret because the box can be only opened by your friend, the friend you intended to access the secret letter. The key advantage of this asymmetric-key cryptography or public-key cryptography is that secret keys are kept with their owners and do not ever need to be shared with anyone else. 

By way of an analogy, think of tuning a musical instrument where one listens for the pulsed harmonic that occurs between two notes that are not quite the same. The periodicity of the harmonic increases as the notes are brought into tune with each other. The harmonic is measured in fractions of a second (Hz), much longer than are the frequencies of the constituent sounds, e.g., the frequency of middle C is 262 Hz. This is an example of the type of harmonic that can be detected using Fourier transform analysis. 

Dahl DW, Moreau P. The influence and value of analogical thinking during new product ideation. J Mark Res. 2002 39(l) 47-60. 

In analogy, think of the rate-determining step as a bottleneck. Imagine a water hose with several attached clamps restricting the flow (Figure 7-1). We can see that the rate at which the water will spew out of the end is controlled by the narrowest constriction. If we were to reverse the direction of flow (to model the reversibility of a reaction), again the rate of flow would be controlled by this point Such is the case in transformations consisting of more than one step—for example, solvolysis. What then, are the steps in our example ... 

---