Note on Technical Problem Solving

Kim B. Clark; Marco   Iansiti

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Background Note | HBS Case Collection | September 1991

Note on Technical Problem Solving

by Kim B. Clark and Marco Iansiti

Format: Print

21 pages

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Citation:

Clark, Kim B., and Marco Iansiti. "Note on Technical Problem Solving." Harvard Business School Background Note 692-036, September 1991.

About the Authors

Kim B. Clark

George Fisher Baker Professor of Administration, Emeritus

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Marco Iansiti

David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration

Technology and Operations Management

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Article | MIT Sloan Management Review | Spring 2020

From Disruption to Collision: The New Competitive Dynamics

Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani

Citation:
Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "From Disruption to Collision: The New Competitive Dynamics." Special Issue on Disruption 2020. MIT Sloan Management Review 61, no. 3 (Spring 2020). View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018 (Revised April 2020)

The Boston Beer Company: New CEO

Christina R. Wing and Marco Iansiti

Keywords: Beer/brewing industry; supply chain; succession; Leadership; Change; Supply Chain; United States;

Citation:
Wing, Christina R., and Marco Iansiti. "The Boston Beer Company: New CEO." Harvard Business School Case 619-021, October 2018. (Revised April 2020.) View Details

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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Roberto Verganti, Luca Vendraminelli and Marco Iansiti

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting the scenario in which innovation takes place. What are the implications for our understanding of design? Is AI just another digital technology that, akin to many others, will not significantly question what we know about design? Or will it create transformations in design that our current frameworks cannot capture?
To address these questions, we have investigated two pioneering cases at the frontier of AI, Netflix, and AirBnB (complemented with analyses in Microsoft and Tesla), which offer a privileged window on the future evolution of design.
We found that AI does not undermine the basic principles of Design Thinking (people centered, abductive, and iterative). Rather, it enables to overcome past limitations (in scale, scope, and learning) of human-intense design processes. In the context of AI factories, solutions may even be more user centered (to an extreme level of granularity, i.e., being designed for every single person), more creative, and continuously updated through learning iterations that span the entire life cycle of a product. Yet, we found that AI profoundly changes the practice of design. Problem-solving tasks, traditionally carried on by designers, are now automated into learning loops that operate without limitations of volume and speed. These loops think in a radically different way than a designer: they address complex problems through very simple tasks, iterated exponentially. The article, therefore, proposes a new framework for understanding design practice in the age of AI. We also discuss the implications for design and innovation theory. Specifically, we observe that, as creative problem-solving is significantly conducted by algorithms, human design increasingly becomes an activity of sensemaking, i.e., to understand which problems make sense to be addressed. This shift in focus calls for new theories and brings design closer to leadership, which is, inherently, an activity of sensemaking.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; design thinking; Technological Innovation; Design; Change; Theory;

Citation:
Verganti, Roberto, Luca Vendraminelli, and Marco Iansiti. "Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-091, February 2020. View Details

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Note on Technical Problem Solving

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