Crowdsourcing is a great way to generate a wealth of new ideas, but filtering out the bad suggestions can often be costly and inefficient.
However, artificial intelligence could soon make crowdsourcing obsolete, according to a new study published in the INFORMS journal Marketing science. The research, led by a team from the University of Oxford, Universidad de Los Andes in Chile, the University of Southern California and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, developed a simple AI model that was able to efficiently identify bad ideas in the world to be excluded. crowdsourcing process, leaving only the most promising ones under consideration.
The AI model can also be easily adjusted by managers to determine the number of ideas to exclude, without losing potentially good ideas.
The vague front
“Idea generation and screening are fundamental to marketing success because they are the start of new product development,” says Gerard Tellis, one of the study authors of the peer-reviewed article ‘Can AI help with ideation?“They belong to the ‘fuzzy front-end’, an important leverage point in the development of new products.”
The researchers tested the AI model using data from Hyve, an innovation company that operates a crowdsourcing platform. Using a dataset of 21 crowdsourcing contests, containing 4,191 ideas, the model was applied to 20 contests and used to predict the success of the 21st dropped idea.
They found that the best model could exclude 44% of ideas and lose only 14% of good ideas, while a two-step approach could exclude 21% of ideas without losing any winners. A new predictor, word atypicality, proved efficient at excluding atypical ideas and favoring more inclusive and richer ideas.
The research shows that AI models, once developed, prove to be relatively cheap to use and, most importantly, do not succumb to internal biases. They are also transparent and provide privacy, protecting a company’s intellectual property.
That doesn’t mean AI can handle it all. “People and experts are still needed,” says Johann Füller, another author of the study. “In the selection phase, AI can replace humans in screening and narrowing down those ideas. But in the long run, if automation is used properly, it can even eliminate the need for human idea generators and make crowdsourcing itself obsolete.”