RWTH scientists win prestigious "Best Paper 2023" award

 

More innovative and creative ideas through collaboration between human beings and artificial intelligence?

This is one of the questions that RWTH scientists Sebastian Bouschery and Frank Piller (RWTH TIM Institute) are researching together with their colleague Vera Blazevic from Radboud University in Nijmegen (NL) - and for which they have now received the prestigious "Best Paper 2023" award at the 30th IPDMC Innovation and Product Development Management Conference. The conference is internationally one of the most important in the field of innovation management.

  Vera Blazevic and Sebastian Bouschery (centre) together with the IPDMC 2023 Conference Chairs, Tommaso Buganza (Politecnico di Milano) and Nuran Acur (University of Glasgow), at the award ceremony on PoliMi's Lecco campus.

The aim of the research was to find out whether a single person, supported only by a generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT, MidJourney), achieves better results in the innovation process than when working together in a classic innovation team. After a large number of controlled experiments in the "AIXperiment lab" at our WiWi faculty, the research team's answer is clearly: Yes!
Their results thus provide a meaningful basis for future ways of working and collaborating in creative processes.

"Our research highlights the scalability of AI, in particular of transformer language models, to support human creativity and increase productivity in brainstorming situations. It offers valuable insights into the benefits of hybrid Human-AI Groups and stimulates reflection on the role of AI in ideation processes," Frank Piller summarises the results of the study, which is part of a larger research programme on AI in the innovation process at RWTH TIM.

Previous publications by the research team of the RWTH TIM Institute on AI and innovation:
Sebastian Bouschery, Vera Blazevic, Frank Piller. Augmenting human innovation teams with artificial intelligence: Exploring transformer-based language models. Journal of Product Innovation Management.40 (2023) 2: 193-154 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12656 (Open Access)

Frank T. Piller, Sebastian G. Bouschery, Vera Blazevic: Hybrid Intelligence for Innovation: Augmenting NPD Teams with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In: The PDMA Handbook of Innovation and New Product Development, 4th Edition, edited by Ludwig Bstieler and Charles Noble, New York: Wiley 2023: 407-425.