Breakthrough thinking powered by science
Think Bigger harnesses decades of research from choice architecture pioneer Sheena Iyengar to help executives break through conventional thinking. Make decisions that matter with a tool built on proven cognitive science.
The Research Problem
Breakthrough ideas don’t come from looking in one place
Most teams research too narrowly — or too randomly. Sheena Iyengar’s methodology starts by breaking your big challenge into its core subproblems, then searches for proven solutions to each one across three layers of increasing distance.
01
Choose the problem
Every breakthrough starts with a problem. The key is breaking it into 3–5 smaller, solvable subproblems — because the best solution to the whole is often an original combination of solutions to its parts.
02
Search three layers for each subproblem
For every subproblem, look to existing solutions across three concentric layers — within your industry, in adjacent fields, and in distant domains.
Chances are someone, somewhere, has already solved a version of your problem.
03
Combine for a breakthrough
The magic is in the combination. By mixing the best solutions from different layers for each subproblem, you assemble an idea that is both novel and grounded in what already works.
The three layers of research
Your Industry
In the box
Most research starts and stops here — studying direct competitors, existing benchmarks, and familiar solutions within your own domain.
The problem? Everyone in your industry is drawing from the same well. The result is incremental thinking and undifferentiated ideas.
Adjacent Spaces
Edge of the box
Neighboring industries, parallel markets, and tangential disciplines hold proven solutions that haven’t yet been applied to your problem.
Most teams know they should look here — but lack a systematic way to identify what’s relevant across adjacent fields.
Distant Domains
Out of the box
Unrelated industries and unexpected analogies are where breakthroughs originate — connections no one else is making.
Almost no one does this well. It’s cognitively impossible to know where to look when the connection isn’t yet visible
“Using the Think Bigger tool [is] like putting the world’s greatest business minds in one room, asking a question, and getting a summary of the 10 best answers in a matter of seconds.”
Kunal Gupta
CEO of NutraMed
Built on the framework behind decades of research
Sheena Iyengar — Columbia Business School professor and one of the world’s leading experts on choice — spent two decades studying how people generate ideas.
Her finding: the most creative breakthroughs come not from unbounded thinking, but from a structured process of decomposing problems, finding existing solutions, and recombining them in original ways.
She codified this in Think Bigger. Think Bigger AI is the next evolution — that proven methodology, supercharged with AI to work faster and at a scale no human team could match.
“Creativity isn’t magic. It’s a method.”
Sheena Iyengar
