Concluding Remarks In this study, we showed that the LLM technology in the form of ChatGPT4, a technology available for just a few months at the time of our experiments, is already significantly better at generating new product ideas than motivated, trained engineering and business students at a highly selective university. Our results examined ideation productivity and quality separately. In each match-up, ChatGPT came out ahead. Combined, the effects of much higher productivity and the higher quality of the best ideas will likely completely trounce human ideators. The order of magnitude advantage in productivity itself is nearly insurmountable, and the higher quality of the best ideas further adds to the advantage of the LLM. We can now put these tools in the hands of any innovator at extremely low cost. This suggests that the critical task in innovation practice may shift from idea generation to idea evaluation and selection, a task for which LLMs do not yet appear to be particularly well suited. It is striking that conventional wisdom prior to 2022 was that AI tools would likely be most useful in rote tasks and that creative work would likely remain the domain of humans. In some ways, the opposite is true of LLMs. The tools are not perfectly reliable oracles providing information, but their lack of judgment leads to extreme productivity and high variance in idea quality resulting, at least in one setting, to creativity greater than that of the average human. Acknowledgments and Funding Sources Funding was provided by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Ideas Are Dimes A Dozen: Large Language Models For Idea Generation In Innovation Page 10 Page 12