Also called Forced Relationships and Forced Association. This involves creating a new idea out of two partially-connected or totally unconnected ones.

One variant is word association, where you take a Random Word from a special list, a book or a dictionary, and use it to escape from old, fixed patterns of thinking.

In his book A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, Roger von Oech provides a list of 400 one-word trigger concepts, together with a random number generator. A useful trigger phrase is: “We could do with a complete break from our thinking… here’s a random word to play with.”