Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation

Prologue: Red Thread Thinking

Creativity is connecting things.

—STEVE JOBS

Since 1847, when the Fry’s chocolate factory in Bristol, England, molded the first chocolate bar suitable for widespread consumption, chocolate makers have thought of dark and milk chocolate simply as flavors. More than 160 years later, when a major candy company engaged us for an innovation project, my team and I discovered an underlying truth about dark and milk chocolate.

Among chocolate lovers, the preference for dark or milk chocolate is decidedly not about taste at all—even though taste is something that people talk about because flavor sensations are easy to articulate. The preference for dark or milk chocolate has to do with much deeper underlying cultural experiences ...