Connecting Making connections between seemingly unrelated ideas is also often at the heart of creative engineering. Novelty can result from going outside a single field or discipline and bringing together diverse concepts, tools, capabilities and ways of thinking. Tissue engineering is a new specialty that creates usable human tissues for repairing or replacing damaged ones. Engineers have tackled this problem by relating medical and biological approaches to those of chemical engineers, materials scientists and engineers, and mechanical and electrical engineers. Some of the basic approaches of tissue engineers borrow from civil engineering. "Scaffolds," for example, provide biodegradable structures on which tissue cells can grow. Another key device used by some tissue engineers is the "bioreactor," a vessel especially designed for the cultivation of living tissue. Tissue engineering is now emerging from the laboratory into medical applications and producing experimental products including skin, cartilage, and liver tissues. Connecting can be equally powerful in the business environment. The use of analogies that connect different fields can proitide a window of insight into new possibilities for value creation. While adhering to the mental models of one's own industry is limiting, trying on the mental models of someone else's can surface intriguing new opportunities. The story of Ethel M. Candies demonstrates the power of connecting across business boundaries. John Haugh, Ethel's new president, faced the daunting challenge of growing the high-end Ethel business in a confectionary market suffering from slow growth and consumers who preferred Godiva — despite Ethel's superior quality in blind taste tests. Rather than continue to pursue the existing packaged-goods strategy, John combined his own career experiences in retail with close observation of the success of Starbucks. If Starbucks could do it with coffee, why couldn't Ethel create a similar experience around chocolate? Thus was born the Chocolate Lounge.