Abstract: How to acquire creative ideas of making new products and new items? This is a difficult problem for managers. The relationship of creative ideas and contradictory problems is introduced, and the mechanism for generating creative ideas and the methods of generating creative ideas for a new product from made products are explored. It is indicated that the theoretic foundation of generating creative ideas is extension theory and the methods of generating creative ideas are innovation methods. And then the progress of generating creative ideas making use of the basic thinking and method of Extenics for generating creative ideas using the advantage of computer's enormous storage and its high speed is introduced.

Key words: creative idea; Extenics; contradictory problem; creative idea generating； extension innovation method