Building Virality and Unleashing Creativity: The Power of Incentives and Bisociation

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Aug 29, 2023
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Building Virality and Unleashing Creativity: The Power of Incentives and Bisociation
Introduction:
In today's highly connected world, building virality into a product is crucial for its success. The ability to spread awareness and generate user engagement can make or break a product. Similarly, creativity plays a vital role in various fields, including humor, art, and science. Understanding the underlying mechanisms behind these concepts can unlock new avenues for innovation. In this article, we explore the intersection of building virality into products and the theory of bisociation proposed by Arthur Koestler.
- 1. Incentives: Rewarding Both Sides
When it comes to encouraging users to invite their friends and ensuring their friends accept the invitation, providing incentives for both sides is crucial. This mutual benefit creates a positive feedback loop that drives virality. LinkedIn's early success can be attributed to their strategy of prominently displaying the number of connections on a user's profile. By incentivizing users to invite more people, they tapped into the innate desire for social validation.
- 2. Collaboration and Embedding: Unleashing Virality
Collaboration and communication-focused apps have a built-in advantage in terms of virality. By creating value through multiple users, these products naturally encourage users to invite others to join. Additionally, allowing others to embed your product into their websites can expose it to a wider audience. This not only boosts visibility but also familiarizes potential users with the expected content and behaviors.
- 3. Social Sharing and Unique Content
Creating uniquely interesting content within your product can motivate users to share it on their social networks. Auto-sharing content onto other networks can be a powerful tool for spreading awareness. The concept of "Come for the tool, stay for the network" coined by Chris Dixon exemplifies the idea of creating appealing artifacts that users are compelled to share with their networks. By generating shareable information and providing a rich experience around it, your product can leverage the network effect.
- 4. Bisociation: The Creative Act
Arthur Koestler's theory of bisociation sheds light on how creativity works in various domains. Bisociation refers to the integration of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference. It is the perceiving of a situation or idea in two distinct contexts. In humor and art, this manifests as the transitory juxtaposition of matrices, while in science, it leads to their permanent integration into a cumulative and hierarchic order.
- 5. The Power of Bisociation in Creativity
Bisociation allows for the creation of novel and original ideas by combining previously independent components. It operates on the highest level of existing knowledge hierarchies, leading to objective novelty. While minor bisociative processes occur naturally, true innovation requires subjective originality. By embracing bisociation, individuals can restructure their mental organization and unleash their creative potential.
- 6. Virality and Bisociation: Common Ground
The connection between virality and bisociation lies in the restructuring of mental organization. Just as virality requires building it into the core mechanics of a product, creativity thrives when independent components are brought into contact. Both concepts necessitate a revolutionary or disruptive side, transforming existing frameworks and generating new possibilities.
Conclusion:
Incorporating virality into product design and understanding the theory of bisociation can significantly enhance innovation and user engagement. By providing incentives, encouraging collaboration, and enabling social sharing, products can harness the power of networks. Simultaneously, embracing bisociation can unlock creativity in various fields, leading to novel and original ideas. To leverage these concepts effectively, remember to reward both sides, create value through collaboration, and focus on generating unique content. By doing so, you can build a product that not only spreads virally but also inspires creativity and sets the stage for future innovation.
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