Abstract

In a series of studies, AI has proven to be more innovative during creative problem-solving than most humans. How can we implement this enormous innovative resource for developing our next competitive advantages?

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Introduction

Creativity is the engine for innovation. It naturally fosters new ideas within the organization: ideas for improving work processes, ideas for developing stronger relationships with customers and stakeholders, ideas for enhancing products and services, ideas for cost reduction, ideas for exploring new sales channels, and ideas for everything related to everyday business operations. Consequently, these ideas replace declining and less effective ones, leading to new competitive advantages (Drejer et al., 2019).

The more great ideas we generate, the more opportunities we can choose from, providing a stronger foundation for decision-making when tackling complex problems. Consequently, creative thinking assists in making better decisions when addressing complex problems.

This paper examines key creative tasks where teams can utilize AI in their creative problem-solving: understanding the problem better, generating more and better ideas, as well as visualizing alternative scenarios for user and stakeholder reactions to new ideas.

Key insights

A 2022 study by Stevenson et al. tested ChatGPT-3’s creative performance using the Alternative Uses Test. The test presents an everyday object (such as a stapler, a vase, or a soap dispenser) and instructs individuals to think of as many alternative uses for this object as possible (Guilford, 1967). They compared the AI responses to human responses using expert ratings. Their results showed AI responses to be ‘impressive, and in many cases appear human-like.’ However, they concluded that human creativity outperforms that of GPT-3 (Stevenson et al., 2022).