Leveraging Synesthesia for Novel Idea Generation

A firms’ ability to constantly generate new products is strongly related to the capacity to achieve a competitive advantage, especially in times of uncertainty (Grønhaug and Kaufmann 1988; Han et al. 1998). Not surprisingly, a recent survey of more than 1,500 senior executives conducted by the Boston Consulting Group in 2013, indicated that executives rate the importance of innovation as higher than ever (Wagner et al. 2013). In this effort, idea generation is of critical importance as it is tightly related to innovation success (Soo et al. 2002). A relevant concept here is synesthesia, which permits associations among seemly-unrelated cognitive sensations (e.g. hearing colors) (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2005). Although generally considered “fixed”, recent evidence suggests that a type of pseudo-synesthesia may be acquired through training (Colizoli et al. 2012). This study draws from associative theory to explore the unexamined link between learned synesthesia and creativity.