Innovation using AI - Ultimate Guide: Part 1 - Deficiencies of Human Innovation
The limited potential of human capabilities on one hand and opportunity for AI on the other. How AI can drive better outcomes by supporting where human skills are lacking.
This is the first post of the series on complexities of innovation and the opportunities represented by capabilities of current level of artificial intelligence systems.
Innovation, or the process of creating new ideas, products, services, or processes, brings a multitude of benefits to society, the economy, and individual organizations.
Opens up new markets and business opportunities.
Companies gain a competitive edge by differentiating their products and services, and thus appealing to new customers, and increasing their market share.
Solves complex social and environmental challenges
Improves quality of life by making everyday tasks easier, enhancing health and longevity, and increasing access to information and education.
Enhancing efficiency and productivity by better processes and practices, using less resources, reducing costs, and less time spent on tasks.
Stimulating further innovation by laying the groundwork for future developments.
Empowering individuals and communities by providing greater access to information, education, and platforms for self-expression and entrepreneurship.
In the first post, we will delve into the limits of human driven innovation and try to imagine what opportunities AI presents for each of the limits.
People are typically limited in many respects when it comes to innovation potential, whether it is their cognitive biases, resource constraints, risk aversion, or groupthink. Restricted to a career consisting of stops at 1 to typically maximum 6 position types, they have very limited scope of understanding possible points of view their colleagues at other departments have.
Therefore it is key to encourage diverse perspectives, foster culture of continuous learning, promote risk-taking, as well as support both collaboration and independent thought.
In order to structure the debate about benefits of AI to human innovativeness, we have identified following main limits and opportunities:
Lack of Understanding: Complexities of design, engineering, marketing and sales of a product are typically far more comprehensive than one employee can understand.
The opportunity for AI lies in aggregating a knowledge base with documentation, consumer-focused presentation, internal and external communication and performance data in order to answer any question required by anyone in the company, while of course properly managing access rights.
Incomplete Picture Resulting in Bias: Even domain professionals cannot rely solely on their intuition, because they do not own a complete overview. Humans fulfilling their managerial duties essentially only come across limited set of problems and data points.
The opportunity for AI lies in decision-making using data and algorithms, compensating for potential biases in human intuition.
Optimizing via Previously Seen Setups: Humans tend to incline towards managerial constellations they deem to be useful from their subjective previous experience.
The opportunity for AI is in best practice aggregation from all the world's companies and managerial endeavors.
Lack of Arguments: Human intuition does not always work deterministically, where one would be able to reason forward to the most optimal conclusion. Often people “know” what is best, without the ability to support their thinking with concrete evidence.
The opportunity for AI lies in support in the form of relevant data and analyses, helping to create strong arguments for the options considered.
Limited Imagination by Adhering to Fixed Truths: Humans often have entrenched beliefs through which they interpret what are the causes of current outcomes.
The opportunity for AI lies in expanding the imagined set of alternative explanations by providing additional evidence and analysis and thus expanding the scope of available thinking.
Limited Set of Possible Solutions: Humans rarely are able to gather all solutions imaginable and therefore the quality of problem solving presents a challenge.
The opportunity for AI lies in identifying patterns and solutions in complex situations that might be challenging for humans to discern.
Limited Access to Insights: Employees typically rely on their personal experience or wisdom present in their team. At the same time, their direct and indirect competitors’ knowledge is being summarized into reports and books collecting best practices.
The opportunity for AI lies in synthesis of information from diverse sources, providing new insights not present in the company.
Inability to See Trends: As we have already touched, the incompleteness of human knowledge is a serious threat and more so in the context of being able to identify trends.
The opportunity for AI lies in analytically breaking down available knowledge and creating datasets which can be plotted and dashboarded in a way that highlights needle in the haystack like insights.
Limited Ability to Predict: It takes a very special mind to be able to give numeric values to own predictions.
The opportunity for AI lies in building complex models that leverage available data in order to reduce reality into key causes and outcomes.
Limited Planning and Strategy Formulation: Every year, the complexity of doing business increases as new specialized software is created to support evermore nuanced points of view, structuring information in a closer detail and supporting increasingly complex decisions.
The opportunity for AI lies in defining key strategies, tactics and plans and analytically highlighting puzzle pieces that support them, essentially tying all key means and arguments to the organizational goals.
Limited Out of Box Thinking: Ingenuity of solutions can be massively improved with creative techniques. This has been known for a long time, but what if those same methods were used to connect diverse pieces of information automatically?
The opportunity for AI lies in offering perspectives, analogies, and contextual suggestions that can inspire humans to think beyond their natural thinking patterns.
Limited Ability to Manage Risk: Risk has always been very subjective to measure, while companies were relying on human analysts for more detailed take on the particular complexities of each risk driver.
The opportunity for AI lies in aggregating and synthesizing various risks and grading their exposure based how they are manifested within the competitive ecosystem.
Routine Tasks Wasting Time for Creativity: Most work currently is composed of many routine tasks that take disproportionately too much time, which could otherwise be focused on more creative endeavors.
The opportunity for AI lies in automating repetitive tasks that do not require much insight or oversight.
Limited Ability to Communicate: Being able to communicate in an unbiased way the most straight-forward and easy to understand manner is a skill hard to be found.
The opportunity for AI lies in breaking linguistic barriers by choosing proper vocabulary and facilitating smoother interaction through better thought formulation.
Lack of Global Collaboration: Having a detailed overview of the competition and potential partners within the larger industrial ecosystem has become a defining aspect in the success of overall innovation efforts.
The opportunity for AI lies in aggregating and collecting textual information about companies' value propositions, features, and business models that could help define own competitive advantage.
We hope, it is clear from this analysis, there is immense potential for future companies to address the presented opportunities.
In the next article of the series, we will have a look at particular capabilities of AI-driven innovation, an effort to synthesize the key cognitive tasks required for innovation efforts, which can be automated.