On April 21st, we celebrated World Creativity and Innovation Day, established by the United Nations to highlight how these forces can contribute to problem-solving. But what does creativity mean in a world fuelled with generative AI? The pace of development is rapid, with new advancements in AI-powered ideation emerging seemingly every day.

Beyond the buzz: solving real problems

While generative AI’s ability to generate novel outputs is impressive, its true value in the innovation process lies beyond mere novelty. But the “wow” factor only goes so far. The key is to look beyond the initial excitement and ask: what problems can this technology help us solve? Our work shows that the most successful application of generative AI combines high-quality data as a starting point with proven innovation frameworks and a high level of human-AI interaction.

By default, generative AI can collapse the ideation process into a space filled with similar, “mediocre” ideas. After all, what’s your competitive advantage if everyone has access to the same generic concepts? The answer lies in actively pursuing diversity and creativity within the AI itself. By feeding generative AI with diverse datasets and employing frameworks that encourage out-of-the-box thinking, we can not only increase the breadth and depth of its outputs, but also elevate the overall creativity of our innovation deliverables.

Data as fuel: quality in, quality out

Just like with our health, the saying “you are what you eat” applies to generative AI as well. The data it’s trained on strongly influences the outcome. For ideation, a little imaginative “hallucination” from the AI can be a good thing, sparking creative leaps with unexpected ideas. However, for data-driven insights, accuracy is paramount. At Human8, we leverage a suite of specialized AI Innovation Assistants for different tasks, from helping us reframe insights to finding the right problems to solve, to applying established creativity frameworks to tackle them effectively.

Reframing the problem: seeing beyond the surface

For most organizations, the most impactful intervention they can implement in their innovation practice is to spend more time in the problem space before jumping into solutions. It’s easy to fall in love with your own ideas, but it’s essential to fully understand the problem you’re trying to solve first. Here, generative AI can be a surprisingly impactful partner. It can assess the potential of insights and explore them holistically, helping us identify underlying patterns and root causes that traditional methods might miss. We developed ‘The Insight Reframing Canvas’, a tool that guides this reframing exercise in collaboration with one of our AI Innovation Assistants.

Idea generation: breaking through creative blocks and overcoming bias

Generative AI excels at generating a vast number of ideas, perhaps too easily at times. However, the output is typically highly polished, which can lead to over-trust in its solutions. Never before has critical thinking and human critique been more important to navigate ideation successfully. We need to ensure the AI-generated ideas are actually solving the identified problem and can be realistically developed.

Here are two key benefits we see from integrating generative AI into the ideation process:

• Accelerating ideation: In line with the principle “quality follows quantity,” generating a long list of ideas that are increasingly different from the status quo can be a time-consuming process. Generative AI can supercharge this process by leveraging proven creativity techniques instantly.
• Recombining the familiar: Breakthroughs often come from unexpected connections. Generative AI surpasses human capabilities when it comes to analysing vast datasets and identifying surprising combinations of existing ideas across different industries, sparking truly novel solutions.

At Human8, we’re at the forefront of this exciting intersection of human creativity and generative AI. We’re helping clients leverage the power of AI within their innovation processes by centralizing decades-long expertise in innovation into intuitive AI frameworks. These frameworks empower us to develop products and services that not only improve people’s lives but also address the challenges that truly matter.