What does it take to change the world? One idea (out of thousands).

Art.In.UX is proud to introduce our exciting project ideas.matter, an AI-powered brainstorming partner that augments your thinking and creativity.🚀

Video by Gemma Alcodori

(Please keep in mind that this is still a working progress. 🤓 We welcome your comments and feedback as we will keep iterating until the final launch for our Master’s in UX in July.)

There is no doubt that the digital transformation journey that businesses have experienced in the last decade has reached a level of maturity that’s calling for the next big thing. The business ecosystem is realizing that the hidden potential of Machine Learning (ML) and the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only making us more productive but also to better address our needs as customers.

What’s one common denominator of all the companies currently winning the technological race? They don’t consider AI as just a tool but as an integral and strategic pillar of their businesses. They re-organize their business models to iterate on AI solutions by having the right data, enabling the right technology, and fostering a business culture for their human talent to thrive.

Still, there is plenty of room for adopting new strategies to capitalize on the synergies between human-machine collaboration to thrive and stay ahead of the game. This means driving innovation by combining technology and people to bring out the best in each.

🔍 The forever evolving definition of “innovation”:

The word “innovation” is derived from the Latin verb “innovare”, which means “to renew” (1). Today’s definition of innovation still holds, in essence, the notion of renewing ideas, however, innovation in a business context includes a more complex approach. Regardless of the kind of industry you are in, one thing remains true, and it’s that innovation consists of two key elements: creativity + implementing ideas (and hopefully you are failing fast to know which are the right ones). Easy in theory, right?

creativity + implementing ideas = innovation infographic. Designed by Gemma Alcodori

But how do you kick-start innovation? Here are the three main consideration that helped us get started in this wild journey of coming up with ideas.matter:

1. Innovation starts by asking the right questions

Defining the right problems you are trying to solve is an essential part of your project’s early stages. We wanted to explore and analyze in-depth the challenges and opportunities in today’s innovation landscape when it comes to co-creating sessions to generate ideas. We asked ourselves “How might we automate the process of capturing insightful information so facilitators can focus on uncovering the team’s best work?” and after drawing key insights from our research, we were able to objectively validate (and invalidate) some of the assumptions we had established.

By mapping our customer’s journey we were able to better understand their goals and frustrations.

🧨 Frustrations: Collaborating with others during ideation sessions tends to be a challenging process. Client uncertainties, misaligned teams, and unbalanced behaviours can jeopardize the quality of ideas that come out of a brainstorming workshop.

🎉 Goal: To extract the best from each team member to obtain the largest number of unobvious ideas as possible.

🗝️ Insights: To offer a new way to facilitate the cultivation of disruptive ideas.

A Harvard Business Review study (2) that performed a meta-analytical review over 800 teams further validated our assumption. They concluded that brainstorming is likely to harm productivity in large teams, especially when they are closely supervised, and when performance is oral rather than written.

4 reasons of why brainstorming is ineffective. Link to Source (3)

2. Innovation doesn’t take place by an exclusive instance but rather as a result of a constant and iterative process. ⚙

Defining the right strategy for our team and aligning its execution with the right solution made us pivot a few times, and we understood that this is a challenge that teams continuously face. Mainly, because strategy definition is a forever evolving process. Over the last four months, we have followed the design thinking process of the double diamond model and it has allowed us to better understand our internal workflow and how our product fits in the lifecycle of the design process as well. 🎯

How does ideas.matter fit the the design thinking journey. Designed by Viola Miebach

Only by researching and understanding why brainstorming and generating ideas is so challenging, we were then able to synthesize our knowledge into insights. Then, and only then, we were in a good position to pursue the most compelling opportunities and assess the viability and impact of our plan.💡

3. Innovation requires building upon a variety of skills as it is a concoction of multiple fields of expertise.

Since day one of our Master’s, The Art.In.UX team was determined to build the most effective team possible to set ourselves for success. Before getting started, we took the necessary time to understand each other’s “grows” and “glows” areas, agree on a collaboration and communication strategy, and built empathy and understanding by sharing our personal and professional goals and expectations. 🧬

We are proud of all the work we have put in and all the new skills we have acquired while working on this project, but most importantly, the life-lasting relationships we are building among ourselves, our stakeholders, and project advisors. They have challenged us to think beyond the reach of our capabilities and explore beyond what we thought was possible. For us, diving deeper and embracing unknown territories has allowed us to uncover exciting opportunities for our solution approach to building ideas.matter. 🚀

How to think big and choose an innovation strategy that fits your team and your project?

Researching these strategies on how to approach innovation allowed me to develop the following questions to better help you assess the current state of your team or organisation. If you can answer them confidently, then you are on the right path to implement innovation properly:

🔍 Does your team know how to define clear problem statements?

🔍 Do you have a clear and evolving innovation strategy in place?

🔍 Do you actively ignite co-creation among your peers?

🔍 Do you have a way to measure and benchmark your innovation initiatives

🔍 Do you repeatedly leverage customer and stakeholder feedback to keep your strategy in tune with their constantly changing needs?

The following innovation matrix can serve you as a guide on how to evolve your strategy and allow you to drive change in your organization.

Link to source (4)

Let me give you the tl:dr to help you make some sense of this buzzword soup:

👉 Breakthrough innovation: Think of Apple in its iPhone era. They were able to combine a series of existing elements as what the phone could intrinsically do, but by introducing new elements in their design product it became a new and bold invention.

👉 Basic research: Although often overlooked, basic research is usually followed by a revealing insight that leads to breakthrough innovation. If you look at it from a historic point of view, R&D teams, universities, and research centers have often been the ones incubating many unconventional ideas that have been adopted by businesses across all industries.

👉 Disruptive innovation: The term was coined by Clayton Christense (5), and to give you an example I want you to think of Airbnb. Hospitality leaders didn’t see it as a thread until it became a global phenomenon offering attractive and personalized offerings.

👉 Sustaining Innovation: Also known as incremental innovation, this type of innovation is a necessary evil for almost every company. The goal of this strategy is to improve and expand the existing possibilities of your product or service until it reaches the end of its life cycle.

Innovation strategy is a forever growing area of expertise because additional models keep emerging as products, services, and processes become even more specialized and end up needing their unique set of considerations. For example, social and marketing innovation strategies will take a completely different approach than those dealing with physical products, and it’s key to leverage multiple strategies in the innovation portfolio of projects.

However, there is still a catch. Can you guess what it is? 🎨

Yes, to propel any of these strategies you still need to generate creative ideas.

So why companies should adopt a creative mentality to solve problems now more than ever?

In short, because it will bring profits to your organization (and I’m not only referring to financial gains).

“Does commitment to corporate innovation actually pay off?” Source Link ( 6)

Employees are one of the main sources of innovative ideas for the company. However, in order for ideas to be implemented, they need to be shared and accepted first, and rigid organizational structures make that process quite difficult. A study by Spigit followed 28 public companies for 2 years , and what they saw time and time again is the higher the rate of ideation, the faster the growth of company profits. The companies that accepted 150 or fewer ideas experienced profit growth and losses. But if you look at the companies that generated 150–600 ideas, all of them show exclusively profit growth, with some as much as 15–20%. 💸

But what does all of this have to do with Artificial Intelligence and how can we encourage bold ideas among your teams when it feels like everything has already been done? 🧐

The AI that will power ideas.matter is a specific branch of Machine Learning called Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is the process through which computers read, understand, interpret and respond to human language. It’s able to do that through a newly developed technology called GPT-3 (7) which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3. The creators of this technology are OpenAI (8), and Elon Musk himself is an investor in the company.

Our colleague KristineDotTech wrote a wonderful conversational design guide for our project (9) that goes in detail on what NLP is and how it works.

Want to hear the exciting part? We got access to experiment with GPT-3 OpenAI playground!

We got developer beta access to OpenAI’s API

Our colleague Viola Miebach has put together a brilliant article (10) that has laid out not only the AI and business ethical standards to keep in mind but also the core AIX considerations we will follow in order to build ideas.matter.

We are thrilled about what’s coming next and how far will we be able to push our limits with this experimentation process. Most importantly, we feel empowered to continue driving a positive change in the world where technology enhances human potential and takes us into a new era of intelligence, one idea at a time.

Sources

1. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/innovation
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15324834basp1201_1?journalCode=hbas20&
3. https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time
4. https://aits.org/2017/07/4-types-innovation-kinds-problems-solve/
5. https://claytonchristensen.com/
6. http://www.ejobios.org/download/development-of-innovative-intrapreneurship-in-the-conditions-of-the-digital-economy-8467.pdf
7. https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-apps/
8. https://openai.com/about/
9. https://medium.com/artinux/conversations-with-ai-the-manual-accda67ee412
10. https://medium.com/artinux/nlp-conversational-ai-the-aix-design-guide-7a95b152b0d0