No link and turn---generative AI augments human creativity.
Tojin T. Eapen et. al 23. Principal consultant at Innomantra and a senior fellow at the Conference Board, Daniel J. Finkenstadt; principal at Wolf Stake Consulting, a military officer, and a former assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School; Josh Folk, cofounder and the president of enterprise solutions at IdeaScale, a cloud-based innovation-software platform; Lokesh Venkataswamy CEO and managing director of Innomantra, an innovation and intellectual-property consulting firm in Bengaluru, India. "How Generative AI Can Augment Human Creativity". Harvard Business Review. 8-1-2023. https://archive.ph/MHTHW#selection-2427.5-2427.16
There is tremendous apprehension about the potential of generative AI—technologies that can create new content such as audio, text, images, and video—to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers to businesses and governments is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation.
The term “democratizing innovation” was coined by MIT’s Eric von Hippel, who, since the mid-1970s, has been researching and writing about the potential for users of products and services to develop what they need themselves rather than simply relying on companies to do so. In the past two decades or so, the notion of deeply involving users in the innovation process has taken off, and today companies use crowdsourcing and innovation contests to generate a multitude of new ideas. However, many enterprises struggle to capitalize on these contributions because of four challenges.
First, efforts to democratize innovation may result in evaluation overload. Crowdsourcing, for instance, may produce a flood of ideas, many of which end up being dumped or disregarded because companies have no efficient way to evaluate them or merge incomplete or minor ideas that could prove potent in combination.
Second, companies may fall prey to the curse of expertise. Domain experts who are best at generating and identifying feasible ideas often struggle with generating or even accepting novel ideas.
Third, people who lack domain expertise may identify novel ideas but may be unable to provide the details that would make the ideas feasible. They can’t translate messy ideas into coherent designs.
And finally, companies have trouble seeing the forest for the trees. Organizations focus on synthesizing a host of customer requirements but struggle to produce a comprehensive solution that will appeal to the community at large.
Our research and our experience working with companies, academic institutions, governments, and militaries on hundreds of innovation efforts—some with and some without the use of generative AI—have demonstrated that this technology can help organizations overcome these challenges. It can augment the creativity of employees and customers and help them generate and identify novel ideas—and improve the quality of raw ideas. We have observed the following five ways.