How AI Can Be a Solver’s Best Friend

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and has been for a while. Recently, a particular type of AI–generative AI–exploded onto the scene. While ChatGPT was the first tool to get headlines, there are now many to choose from. And while controversy swirls around the whole topic of AI, it can be a valuable addition to any professional’s toolbox.

Used in the right ways, generative AI can be a huge help to any open innovation solver who wants to get more out of the experience. Used as a productivity hack, AI in your solving activities can:

• Make you much more efficient
• Streamline the solving process
• Help uncover new angles that you wouldn’t have thought about on your own

AI doesn’t replace your own innovative and creative thinking. Instead, it can enhance and perhaps accelerate the development of skills that are core to successful open innovation solving.

4 Roles for AI Solving Help

You can think of AI in terms of four roles that support your solving activities.

1. Research Assistant

Your AI helper can research the heck out of your challenge topic. Let’s say, for example, that the challenge you’re working on is to design a new type of toothbrush. Prompt AI to show you the research and images covering how the toothbrush has evolved over, say, the last ten years. This gives you a solid base from which to start your solving, in far less time (and probably more completely) than you could have accomplished it yourself.

2. Brainstorming Buddy

AI can be a valuable boost to your ideation. Use prompts that give your tool the opportunity to generate suggestions and also help spark your own thinking. You will likely find that brainstorming casts a wider net in less time with AI.

3. Idea Tester

Novel ideas are often the winners in open innovation challenges, so it’s a good idea to make sure that you aren’t recycling something that already exists.  AI can scrape the entire internet to help you understand what is already out there so that you’re not coming up with something that someone somewhere in the world has already thought of.

4. Advisor

AI can be invaluable as an idea validation engine. For example, you could create a prompt saying, “I have an idea to do X to solve Y problem. Tell me what are challenges you foresee?” Or, “What flaws might I encounter if I try to turn this into reality?”

Beware the Dark Side

While AI for challenge solving can be useful to a great degree, it has the potential to derail your efforts. We’ll talk about the dark side of working with AI in another article.

Learn more about open innovation and solving opportunities at MindSumo.