An interactive session with CMU spin-off Analogical Engines, the AI platform for analogical innovation
Find New Ideas for Your Hardest R&D Challenges in Unexpected Places
Some of history’s biggest breakthroughs came from unexpected places: the Japanese bullet train borrowed from a kingfisher’s beak, the Wright brothers drew on bicycles, and NASA engineers used origami principles to solve spacecraft packaging problems.
But these analogical breakthroughs still happen largely by chance. They depend on whether a team happens to encounter — and recognize — the right idea from another domain. When teams get stuck, they tend to search where they already know, while today’s AI often gives them more of the same.
What if we could turn that serendipity into a repeatable, systematic process?
Analogical Engines is building an AI platform to do exactly that: search distant domains for relevant mechanisms, map those mechanisms into new concepts, and help teams refine and test those concepts against real-world constraints. In a recent pilot on decade-old industrial R&D challenges, experts at a global material sciences company using Analogical Engines surfaced 30+ promising ideas that were rated 54% more novel, with no drop in feasibility, compared with just one promising idea using standard AI tools.
In this interactive session, our team — researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute — will walk through the SMaRT framework for analogical innovation and show how we are turning more than a decade of research into a practical tool for solving hard R&D problems. You can learn more in our white paper: https://www.analogicalengines.com/research
This won’t just be a talk. Bring a problem of your own. If you share an R&D challenge when you register, we can run it through Analogical Engines ahead of the session and create an account for you. During the event, you’ll be able to explore the unexpected inspirations and concepts the system finds for your problem and work through them with our team.
Don’t have a problem to submit? Come anyway. Follow along with the live challenges, learn the principles behind analogical thinking, and see firsthand how the platform searches distant domains for ideas that conventional approaches may miss.
Who should attend? Corporate R&D leaders, scientists and engineers, researchers and faculty, investors, and anyone interested in how AI can help teams discover genuinely new directions for difficult technical problems.
Want to go deeper? The Analogical Engines team will also be holding a limited number of office hours throughout CMU Startup Week for anyone who wants to discuss a specific R&D challenge, explore partnership opportunities, or learn more about how the platform could fit into their organization. We’ll share booking slots soon.
The event is organized in partnership with the CMU Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, CMU VentureBridge, and Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC).
Lunch will be sponsored by CTTEC.
Want to learn more? Visit analogicalengines.com or reach us at partnerships@analogicalengines.com