Innovation , Brainstorming and Genetic Engineering

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The other day I was revisiting some of the brainstorming exercises that were recommended for coming up with new products. Some recommended Idea joggers were:
- What if we made it bigger? Smaller? Combined it with X, Made component X with material Y instead and so on.

And then - I was struck how close this is to biological innovation (evolution). Where genes are mutated. The brainstorming was to mutate the core "genes" of the product.
The "genes" being of course the key attributes about the product or service. e.g size, color,price etc.

Now genetic programming has been around for a while with algorithms to mimic evolution and mutate genes and then evaluate them with fitness functions ie discard bad variations because they do not meet the 'fitness' or survivability test.

So do you think that genetic programming ought to be in the management tool bag for innovation, along with the traditional "brainstorming". Actually- identifying the core "genes" might be a very useful exercise by itself!

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