Metaphors in the Creative Journey: Using Metaphors in Practice

Metaphor is almost universally described as an extraordinary trigger for generating new ideas and essential to support creativity. Creativity, however, does not only mean coming up with new ideas. It also means polishing those ideas and garnering enough organizational support and resources to turn the ideas into products, whose utility has to be displayed to a target group. Thus, idea generation, for which metaphor’s power is usually extolled, is only creativity’s necessary starting point and needs to be followed by other activities that are equally critical. By characterizing the creative process as a journey of ideas, this chapter reconstructs four phases of creativity—idea generation, idea elaboration, idea championing, and idea implementation—outlining the role played by metaphor in each of these phases.