It’s not magic!
Anyone who thinks this is future hocus-pocus can ask Alexa, Siri or Cortana about the weather, order pizza from them or ask banal questions. Works well today – will be even more mature and “human” in the future, when Artificial Intelligence is accompanied by Emotional Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence as a revolution of innovation
In a time of increasing digitalization, artificial intelligence and robots become relevant for innovation; there are already many individual tasks that can be improved, accelerated or even partially autonomously performed by robots through the use of AI. Research in archives or databases, for example, screening social media forums and the www for specific trends and customer needs. Good for those who don’t have to spend days and weeks on it. Better for those who no longer have to deal with it themselves at all.
A simple innovation process with its topics of need identification, trend scouting, technology scouting and management, idea generation and evaluation, concept generation, prototype construction and testing is ideal for the use of AI. After all, innovation is essentially about building up sufficient understanding, searching for information, generating solutions, testing them and then adapting and modifying them depending on the result.
Clearly structureable detail work can be supported and performed by intelligent machines without further effort. So far, the only limitation is the quality and quantity of the data.
Creative machine?
If you think further and begin to allow the idea of using AI in the innovation process, you will not be able to resist the certain feeling that machines will not only be able to do stupid things in the future, but that they will even be able to build up the ability to cope with creative innovation tasks, up to and including the generation of new solutions.
A survey conducted at the Handelsblatt AI Conference in Munich showed that many companies can imagine using AI. However, the gap between imagination and actual use is enormous: only very few companies actually use artificial intelligence to innovate. The current high costs and the still often lacking resources and capabilities within a company are brake pads.
However, experiments in the AI innovation context can easily be tested. The Handelsblatt study also shows that managers and experts expect to see a huge boost in autonomous innovation over the next 10-15 years and that the topic must be considered and located on every map of innovation managers, AI experts and management.
