Crowdsourcing is a great way to generate a lot of new ideas, but filtering out bad suggestions can often be costly and inefficient.
However, artificial intelligence could soon make crowdsourcing obsolete, according to a new study published in the journal INFORMS. Marketing sciences. The research, led by a team from the University of Oxford, the University of 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 weed out bad ideas. in the crowdsourcing process, leaving only the most promising for consideration.
Managers could also easily adjust the AI model to determine how many ideas to discard, without losing potentially good ones.
The front blurred
“Idea generation and selection are critical to marketing success because they comprise the initiation of new product development,” said Gerard Tellis, one of the authors of the peer-reviewed paper’s study.Can AI help with ideation?‘ “They belong to the ‘fuzzy front’, a key point of influence in the development of new products.”
The researchers tested the AI model using data from Hyve, an innovation company that runs a crowdsourcing platform. Using a data set of 21 crowdsourcing contests, including 4,191 ideas, the model was fitted to 20 contests and used to predict success on the 21st skipped idea.
They found that the best model could discard 44% of ideas, losing only 14% of good ones, while a two-step approach could exclude 21% of ideas without losing any winners. A new predictor, the word atypical, proved to be effective in discarding atypical ideas and favoring more inclusive and rich ones.
The study found that AI models, once developed, turn out to have a relatively low cost of operation and, more importantly, do not succumb to internal biases. They are also transparent and offer privacy, which helps safeguard a company’s intellectual property.
That doesn’t mean AI can handle everything. “People and experts are still needed,” said Johann Füller, another author of the study. “In the selection phase, AI can replace humans in selecting and narrowing down those ideas. But in the long term, if automation is used properly, it can even eliminate the need for human idea generators and make crowdsourcing be obsolete.”
