**5. Conditions that foster originality in conceptual combination**

However, not all ideas that emerge from a combination of novel concepts are original [25]. Several factors might affect the outcome of a conceptual combination, including novelty or semantic distance of concepts [33, 34], the abstractness of the concepts to be combined [35, 36], types of interpretation required [37–39], age [40], number of iterations [41], or even the ontological category of the concepts. For example, Bock and Clinton [39] found that noun-noun pairs of the natural kind elicited significantly more property-related interpretations (e.g., moon-orange → round) than noun-noun pairs of the artifact kind. Likewise, noun-noun pairs of the artifact kind elicited significantly more relational interpretations (e.g., knife-bike → cutting the edge) than noun-noun pairs of the natural kind. Last but not least, recognition and decisions regarding which ideas to select and retain from a pool of interpretations are also important [8, 24].

Imaginativeness of an emerged idea is thus a function of availability and distance among the ideas to be combined in one's brain, the type of interpretation chosen in conceptual combination, and pattern recognition to identify the desired final idea. This model of technological imagination and innovation can therefore be described by integrating Klahr and Simon's [8] model of scientific discovery and Simonton's [25, 28, 42] blind variation, selection, and retention (BVSR) theory of creativity. Namely, cognitive processes involved in technological innovation include three

#### **Figure 1.**

*Cognitive process in technological innovation.*

components: 1. availability of cross-domain knowledge, where concepts from two or more than two domains need to have a chance to meet in one's head; 2. a simple heuristic, namely conceptual combination, is applied to make one or more than one interpretation to combine seemly unrelated concepts; and 3. some utility functions, or selection and retention criteria are applied so the individual can recognize and choose certain types of interpretation yielded by conceptual combination (**Figure 1**). Imaginativeness of an idea that emerges from conceptual combination is a product of these three factors within an individual. According to this model, cognitive tasks for an individual engaged in the CDIO processes of a technological innovation are analyzed as follows.
