The positive outlook for generative AI (GenAI) is to help humanity find new ways to unlock creativity and discover new insights to solve significant challenges. It will be a fantastic journey for all of us!
It has been a year since chatGPT was launched to the public, and its adoption has skyrocketed. There are no signs of slowing down. GenAI is a technology that can create new content such as text, images, audio, and video from a few human (or machine) instructions, also known as prompts. This brings back the idea of users developing their solutions and services instead of depending on a third-party company to build them, as MIT's Eric Von Hippel envisioned in his research on democratizing innovation almost two decades ago.
Seeing the Forest for the Tree
An article by HBR published in June 2023 titled "How Generative AI Can Augment Human Creativity" highlighted that many companies struggle with effectively implementing and promoting innovation to generate compelling solutions and services for their respective industries. One of the main issues is that these organizations only focus on synthesizing customer requirements but fail to involve their employees and customers in the creative process to generate new and innovative ideas or improve the quality of existing ones. This critical link is necessary for the successful democratization of innovation.
Promote Divergent Thinking
GenAI promotes divergent thinking by creating output that combines unrelated concepts and suggests ways to refine and enhance the original ideas. This is accomplished with the help of several tools, including diffusion models, a text-to-image model, and transformer AI architectures (such as chatGPT - a widely recognized large-scale language model developed by OpenAI).
Challenge Expertise Bias and Support Idea Evaluation
New product development (NPD) involves overcoming biases such as design fixation, functional fixedness, and previous experiences that may hinder problem-solving. GenAI tools can assist in the front end of innovation by helping humans evaluate the dimensions of creativity, such as novelty, feasibility, and business potential. In addition to the above, GenAI can be used by teams and individuals, inside or outside organizations, to support idea refinement and collaboration. Humans possess immense creativity, but the challenge lies in simplifying and effectively communicating their ideas in written or visual forms. The future of innovation depends on our ability to nurture and safeguard human creativity.