In Semantic Intuition, as another creative technique of random stimulation and creative confrontation, the problem is associated with stimulus words.
This method takes advantage of the semantics of our language (semantics is the study of the meaning of the terms of a language) and is therefore based on the phenomenon that hearing or reading a word of our language always produces, simultaneously and intuitively, a more or less plastic, mental idea about the essence of this word.
The focus of interest is:
– the meaning of individual linguistic expressions,
– the relationships between individual expressions,
– the meaning of complete sentences and
– the relationship between expressions and extra-linguistic reality.
So when you now read the word “ice cream” or hear it, it does not remain with a purely acoustic perception, but your brain equally immediately sets up an “accompanying image” from the experience, and a concrete ice cream cone with one or two scoops of ice cream appears in front of your mind’s eye. Of course, different people will have slightly different ideas – for a polar explorer, for example, the Arctic ice and an icebreaker appear in his mind’s eye.
This corollary effect of “first perceiving concept and second developing pictorial imagination” naturally also occurs when novel concepts are heard. These then also lead to new kinds of ideas, new thoughts, new possibilities. And this is exactly the principle on which Semantic Intuition works. Depending on the problem, terms from one or more subject areas are randomly combined with each other. It is not uncommon to intuitively recognize surprising new meanings from such combinations of goals, which can be expanded into concrete ideas.
Semantic intuition is a method of free invention and is therefore particularly suitable for idea generation and here very efficient for finding new products.