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  • 2024
  • Working Paper
  • HBS Working Paper Series

The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving

By: Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic and Karim R. Lakhani
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
  • | Pages:39
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Abstract

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy business ideas generated by the human crowd and collaborative human-AI efforts using two alternative forms of solution search. The challenge attracted 125 global solvers from various industries, and we used strategic prompt engineering to generate the human-AI solutions. We recruited 300 external human evaluators to judge a randomized selection of 13 out of 234 solutions, totaling 3,900 evaluator–solution pairs. Our results indicate that while human crowd solutions exhibited higher novelty—both on average and for highly novel outcomes—human-AI solutions demonstrated superior strategic viability, financial and environmental value, and overall quality. Notably, human-AI solutions co-created through differentiated search, where human-guided prompts instructed the large language model (LLM) to sequentially generate outputs distinct from previous iterations, outperformed solutions generated through independent search. By incorporating “AI-in-the-loop” into human-centered creative problem-solving, our study demonstrates a scalable, cost-effective approach to augment the early innovation phases and lays the groundwork for investigating how integrating human-AI solution search processes can drive more impactful innovations.

Keywords

Large Language Models; Crowdsourcing; Generative Ai; Creative Problem-solving; Organizational Search; AI-in-the-loop; Prompt Engineering; AI and Machine Learning; Innovation and Invention

Citation

Boussioux, Léonard, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic, and Karim R. Lakhani. "The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-005, July 2023. (Revised July 2024.)

Supplemental Information

Appendix
  • SSRN
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About The Authors

Jacqueline Ng Lane

Technology and Operations Management
→More Publications

Karim R. Lakhani

Technology and Operations Management
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