Smart Thesaurus

Visual Brainstorming

The smart thesaurus is more than a dictionary and thesaurus for the English language: The smart thesaurus is a visual brainstorming software best suited to support creative and lateral thinking by the Random Word technique - with more than 117,000 words.

Move from a stimulus to an idea

The Random Word technique is the most basic and obviously creative technique where a random word is used to move from a stimulus to a new idea. By getting a random word as a prompt and forcing yourself to use it to solve your problem, you are guaranteed to attack the problem from a different direction to normal.

A random word is an initial stimulus. Extract its underlying principles and then apply them to your problem.
The smart thesaurus supports you to establish a bridging idea, i.e. a bridge between the stimulus and an idea which could actually be used on your problem: By thinking of antonyms, meronyms, hypernyms, or hyponyms. Retrieve new aspects and extend your insights into your problem.

Example

Using the random word "balloon" in the context of new ideas about cars:

A bridging idea could be that you inflate the balloon under the car. The advantages of this would be that the car jack would not puncture rusty cars and that cars could be raised on soft ground.
The resulting final idea could be to have a car jack which spreads its force more evenly under the car and onto the ground.