Harnessing AI for continuous innovation : building sustainable innovation ecosystem through organizational data

Abstract

Innovation is the main requirement to maintain relevance in today’s rapidly evolving markets. In traditional view the innovation is still considered to be a periodical in nature driven by short term events such as hackathons or innovation workshops or locked in separate functions such as Research and Development also being heavily influenced by personal biases of decision makers. This thesis proposes the usage of Artificial Intelligence to create an inclusive, AI supported continuous ecosystem that has the potential to help organizations establish and support an innovation culture that motivates and harnesses collective creative potential of all employees. AI as a tool is fundamental in such innovation ecosystem. It guides the employees through the ideation process, ensuring that the innovation is data-driven, properly formatted and at the end transformed into an opportunity aligned with business strategy. All ideas are submitted to a pipeline where no idea is lost, and all ideas are treated equally because an idea may be ahead of its time today but may become a perfect one once the cultural and market conditions change. To support this, AI plays another crucial role by governing a ranking list based on proposed comprehensive ranking matrix used to evaluate every idea based on internal capabilities, external market factors, dynamic trends, and additional criteria like sustainability and ethical considerations thus removing biases from ranking and creating a transparent environment. Following the ranking table and criteria, this thesis proposes the detailed set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) to measure the impact of innovation and AI, that address not only financial returns but also employee engagement, sustainability outcomes, operational efficiencies and general state of innovation culture in the organization. The importance of risk management and governance is emphasized as an integral component for building and maintaining stakeholders’ engagement and ensuring their support and involvement in the newly established AI supported innovation ecosystem. This is further supported by a strategy for implementing AI in the innovation ecosystem while addressing the expected issues and pushbacks related to change. In the end, this thesis presents that AI is the technology that has the power to greatly transform the innovation process. It can improve and democratize ideation process, log every proposed innovation idea and provide evidence-based data-driven transparent evaluation (ranking score).