Accelerating Innovation Through Analogy Mining

The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., patents) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent challenge for both humans and computers. Previous approaches include costly hand-created databases that do not scale, or machine-learning similarity metrics that struggle to account for structural similarity, which is central to analogy. In this paper we explore the viability and value of learning simple structural representations. Our approach combines crowdsourcing and recurrent neural networks to extract purpose and mechanism vector representations from product descriptions. We demonstrate that these learned vectors allow us to find analogies with higher precision and recall than traditional methods. In an ideation experiment, analogies retrieved by our models significantly increased people's likelihood of generating creative ideas.