“And the more distant the analogy, the better it was for idea generation. Students who were pointed to Nike and McDonald’s generated more strategic options than their peers who were reminded of computer companies Apple and Dell. Just being reminded to analogize widely made the business students more creative. Unfortunately, students also said that if they were to use analogy companies at all, they believed the best way to generate strategic options would be to focus on a single example in the same field. Like the venture capitalists, their intuition was to use too few analogies, and to rely on those that were the most superficially similar. “That’s usually exactly the wrong way to go about it regardless of what you’re using analogy for,” Lovallo told me.”