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Realizing the deep cooperation between employees and AI goes far beyond the simple application of technology, and requires re-exploration and redefinition of individual capabilities. Individuals need to benefit from receiving AI assistance to collaborating with AI, and even benefiting from cooperation, and focus their energy and resources on more original breakthrough creations or more subtle incremental creations, and enhance relevant capabilities and qualities.
Text / Wang Xueli, Chen Han, Wu Yuke
From the AI wave triggered by ChatGPT in 2023 to the 60-second realistic video generated by the Sora model released by OpenAI in February this year, it has stirred up waves in the hearts of practitioners in different industries. Opinions differ as to which jobs will be disrupted and which industries will die as a result. However, there is a consensus that change is happening at an unprecedented pace. Founded less than one year ago, the creativity of the Sora development team with only 12 core members has also impressed many companies. According to MIT Technology Review, talent is most important in an AI ecosystem with talent, data, capital, and hardware as the four elements. Talent is the main driver of algorithm and hardware innovation, and talent is more important than data in the long run. Even in non-AI industries, new AI applications have brought about many changes in organizational innovation and employee creativity, which are reflected in the range of sources, capability preferences, and the support and implementation mechanisms of innovation.
There is an increased demand for breakthrough creativity and incremental creativity
Scholars such as Madjar distinguish employee creativity into two types: more original breakthrough creativity, which refers to effective idea generation that is radically different from the organization's existing practices, and more subtle incremental creativity, which refers to effective idea generation that makes small improvements on the organization's existing practices. With the application of AI in organizations, both breakthrough creativity and incremental creativity in organizations are moving in a more extreme direction.
For breakthrough creativity, AI can help companies quickly aggregate, classify, and integrate disparate ideas based on existing practices in the industry (not all of them are effective or meaningful, of course), and the demand for more breakthrough creative employees increases. The ability to "make something out of nothing", to go from "0" to "1", and even to come up with a new "1", is a concrete manifestation of this creativity. This means that companies tend to select individuals with more groundbreaking creative cognitions, traits and behaviors when hiring employees – pursuing high-risk and challenging tasks and preferring to challenge existing cognitions and behaviors; Have a proactive personality and be open-minded; Behavioral habits with heterogeneous knowledge networks and active acquisition of consistent knowledge. During Facebook's rapid growth phase, Zuckerberg described ten criteria for a good employee: high intelligence; A strong sense of purpose; Relentless focus on success; Enterprising and competitive; High demanding, bordering on perfectionism; Likes to change and innovate; I like to think about how to do things better; Likes to collaborate; Honesty and integrity; Caring about actual value rather than perceived value. In fact, these ten criteria can also be seen as the criteria for judging breakthrough creative talents.
For progressive creativity, AI can provide universal and perfect solutions covering process technology, process efficiency, etc., based on the analysis and learning of various objective data and event information in organizational practice, but if it involves more subjective cognition and experience, AI may not be able to do so. Incremental innovation in the field of personalized products and services relies on people's creativity, so when selecting employees, companies will be more inclined to people with such characteristics: keen observation, good at empathy, empathy, good at self-supervision, and able to propose more granular and targeted ideas. Employees with these characteristics are significantly different from those who have been in the forefront of breakthrough creativity, and are less likely to be labeled as "creative" in traditional business management practices.
In today's increasingly competitive world, managers need to think outside the box and seek more channels to acquire more creative talent.
Expansion from employee creativity to stakeholder creativity
Innovation comes from all forces that can be united. This phrase is no longer a joke today, but a corporate practice that is happening. In the field of R&D, some companies have shifted from R&D (Research & Development) to C&D (Connect & Development). There are different evaluations of this change, but it is undeniable that C&D is a collaborative model that allows various members of the industry ecosystem to take what they need and show their strengths. It's a very formal way for businesses to capture their external creativity.
In addition to this, businesses can also gain new creativity in their interactions with stakeholders. Stakeholders include strong stakeholders such as customers (users), partners (competitors) and suppliers, as well as a wider range of stakeholders such as enterprises in other industries, general netizens and forum visitors, potential employees and potential users. Interaction can be based on face-to-face project-based interactions or interactions generated by conscious search in cyberspace. New creativity can both lead to breakthrough innovation and can be applied to incremental innovation.
Apple's breakthrough innovation, the iPod, was born as a result of its interaction with stakeholders. The original idea for the iPod came from independent contractor Tony · Feder. Excited about the idea, Jobs immediately set up a development team and hired Fedel as the main leader. The development team completed the product development plan in eight weeks. After entering the cross-industry product development alliance stage, the entire design process is managed by Apple, the key software and user interface are also led by Apple, and the platform and other related technologies are taken care of by portable player companies and others. All parties will share the dividends of growth. In just six months, the new product was launched to the market and was an instant hit, with huge commercial gains.
Xiaomi's product development and innovation model based on user participation is a classic example of the application of stakeholder creativity in the field of incremental innovation. During the product planning phase, Xiaomi invites users to participate in discussions to understand their needs. During the product design phase, designers regularly share design ideas on social media, solicit suggestions from users, and collect user feedback, so as to continuously adjust the design direction and improve the details. When it comes to product testing, Xiaomi will solicit users in the community to participate in the internal and public testing of the product, and continuously adjust the product based on feedback to improve user satisfaction.
In recent years, more cross-border innovation has emerged, which is related to the habit of transplantation and cross-indexing in innovative thinking, which is also to obtain creativity from a wider range of stakeholders. "What to learn from XXX" and "Can we become the XXX of this industry" have become the questions that managers ask themselves. The "XXX" here is not similar to the manager's enterprise in terms of product and service types, or even very different, but it is possible to bring gradual or breakthrough innovation by mining the internal logic, model or mechanism through appearance, or understanding the new needs of the same target customer group.
A broader and more diverse source of creativity also includes AI. AI is capable of accumulating information beyond a single individual and organization, and can even produce results outside of existing logic and paradigms. Interacting with AI and learning through interaction can spark new ideas and open up new horizons, potentially generating innovations that meet the needs of your organization.
Capturing a wider range of individual creativity is a logical strategy for organizations, but it's not easy to implement. The obstacle lies not only in the relationship between resource investment and revenue measurement, but also in the mindset of the organization's managers, especially those who are at the forefront of the industry. The dominant position of "has always been imitated, never surpassed" will inevitably breed its conceit and island mentality, such as "not a level", "not a model", "not an industry" and other judgments make it lose the opportunity to discover innovation, obscuring the vision of innovation. Outsiders do not understand the specific product and service production process of the enterprise; The views of individual individuals are not representative of the user as a whole; The people who eat melons are shouting blindly, and there is no rigor at all; AI ideas are too advanced and lack logic to implement: These assumptions affect the accurate evaluation of relevant ideas and limit the possibilities of application.
There are many channels and ways to obtain individual creativity, but it is a more complex and challenging process to transform individual creativity into organizational innovation.
The challenge of transforming from individual creativity to organizational innovation
Many scholars in the field of innovation believe that an individual's creativity in the workplace is only the first stage of innovation. Individuals are more concerned with the generation of novel, useful ideas or ideas, but innovation involves the implementation and execution of ideas or ideas. A large number of studies have explored the factors influencing creativity generation and implementation, including organizational creativity reward levels and structures, organizational climate and culture, team composition, leadership styles, and support systems that constitute leadership, colleague, client, and family support. Nevertheless, it is not easy to translate individual creativity into organizational innovation in practice, which once again confirms the complexity of this process. The reason for this is that the challenges posed by a rapidly changing, more competitive, and more VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) business environment cannot be ignored.
First, the challenge of achieving innovation results as quickly as possible. This not only affects the criteria for evaluating the value of innovation, but also directly leads to the paradox of the organization's preference for the type of innovation. Enterprises believe that breakthrough innovation can bring more competitive advantages and first-mover profit margins, but they are worried that if they cannot complete it as soon as possible, they may be preempted by competitors. Or when it is done, the market has changed and the innovation has no market value. Before the release of Sora, many organizations were also engaged in various R&D in related fields, investing a lot of human and financial capital, but as soon as Sora was released, there was a scene of one happy family and many sorrows. In the future, these examples are bound to occur more frequently, making organizations reluctant to invest in breakthrough innovation. Organizations are also well aware that incremental innovation is a field that is "rolled to the extreme", and the advantages brought by incremental innovation are shortening and shortening, and the excess value is becoming less and less. In terms of organizational resource allocation, Facebook's "6-2-2 Time Allocation Principle" (i.e., 60% of the time is spent on the main business that can generate the expected benefits, 20% of the time is spent on the back-office architecture and product quality, and 20% of the time is spent on more risky innovation projects) and Google's "70/20/10 Resource Allocation Principle" (70% to the core business, 20% to the new business, and 10% to the new product or service) have been the best practices that many companies that value innovation have emulated. However, in recent years, in the face of the same new field, some well-known large enterprises have clearly announced that they will stop investment and development, some companies still insist on investment, and some companies have said that as more powerful organizations have left the market, they should adjust their expectations for the commercial value of innovative products. In the future, this dilemma will arise more and more.
Second, the impact and challenge of short-term evaluation pressure on business performance on innovation culture. In the stable stage of operation, especially in the period of abundant organizational resources, some companies have created a well-known culture of innovation, such as 3M's "15% time principle", Google's "20% time" work system, Apple's "Blue Sky Plan" and Samsung's "self-inspired leave" system, etc., are all formal systems that allow employees to spend a certain amount of working time on personally interested, creative work and project development, or the discovery of new ideas. These institutional arrangements have also resulted in products that have significant commercial value to the organization, such as 3M's iconic Postit Note and Google's Gmail. It is conceivable that not every employee in the enterprise that adopts this kind of system can create such results, and at the moment when more emphasis is placed on "tightening the belt to live", do managers still have the determination to adhere to this long-term orientation and cultural demonstration? Under the pressure of shareholders and the market, more companies are inclined to put forward the demand of "please give me the result". Some employees jokingly said, "The OKRs that we claim to encourage innovation are becoming more and more like the previous KPIs." Of course, this is a normal response to competition and resource constraints, but it inevitably conflicts with the culture needed to innovate.
Third, the change of employees' risk appetite challenges the effectiveness of organizational innovation incentive systems and models. Steve Jobs once said that only people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world can really change the world. Innovation itself is a risky activity, and people with a high risk appetite are more willing to participate in innovation than those with a low risk appetite. In past practice, enterprises have designed some innovative systems and mechanisms to encourage innovation. For example, some companies have set up huge innovation awards and innovation honors, giving employees (teams) heroic recognition and bonuses (stocks) much higher than the general reward amount; Some enterprises have formulated an intrapreneurship system, invested in innovative projects for employees (teams), and encouraged them to establish new companies and be the "heads" of their own innovative projects (products); Wait a minute. Sony created the "First Fly" crowdfunding website to finance Sony employees' innovative projects and to serve as an online store for selling employees' innovative products. These systems or mechanisms are designed to effectively motivate individuals with high risk appetite and strong creativity, but for employees with relatively low risk appetite, the incentive effect may be greatly reduced. In the current workplace where "Buddhism" and "lying flat" are prevalent, the attractiveness and effectiveness of these systems have decreased significantly. Some companies have found that the innovation funds set up by the company used to have many applicants, and now they need to mobilize employees to apply. When exploring the reasons, employees invariably cite doing their jobs better as a reason. In the eyes of managers, it is the need for job stability and security that has strengthened, and uncertainty and insecurity should be eliminated by strengthening the competency of the current job. When "not seeking merit, but seeking no fault" becomes the goal of work, it is understandable that the activity of "innovation with a very small probability of merit, and a greater probability of consuming various resources but no results" is neglected.
AI is applied to the construction of organizational innovation
No matter how the form of the organization evolves and how diverse the output mode of products and services is, the core competitiveness of the organization must be inseparable from the ability to innovate. So, what role can AI play in this? At the level of individual creativity, AI can play at least three roles.
The first is trainers and trainers. Organizations such as businesses and schools have already begun to use AI as a learning assistant to help employees or students acquire customized, targeted abilities (or knowledge). Based on the perspective of creativity, AI can at least help members of the organization to expand their horizons, systematically and targeted the thinking training they need for innovation, and provide them with more relevant information about industries or fields to facilitate the establishment of associations and links. The research on the application of artificial intelligence technology in the workplace finds that artificial intelligence technology as a work resource can enhance the perception of work autonomy, and then stimulate employees' innovative behavior.
The second type is the creative process faclitator. After the initial idea is born, AI can do things such as strategy deduction and simulation, and provide as many questions as possible from different perspectives (of course, not all of them are logical and realistic). This can be a process of optimizing an idea, or it can be a process of helping the idea proposer identify problems early or even abandon the idea (which is still valuable in terms of energy resource savings and sunk cost reduction).
The third type is the substitutor for employee creativity. According to Konosuke Matsushita's explanation, innovation is unrestricted thinking, and human beings are subtly limited by various rules and norms in the process of cognitive growth from the first day of birth. Perhaps when it comes to breakthrough creativity, AI is less disciplined and limited by the real world than humans. After all, human divergent thinking is limited, and the sources of knowledge and input for AI are endless. AI has the power to provide humans with inspiration and even more ideas. This capability of AI provides an opportunity for companies with limited human capital and in highly competitive industries to "go off the beaten track". Previous studies have found that with the continuous development of technology, AI has shown capabilities in different innovative tasks that surpass 90%~99% of human participants. It is also a realistic strategy to use AI to solve the problem of the lack of creativity of individual organizations in order to find new areas, new products or services.
In addition, in the process of transforming individual creativity into organizational innovation, enterprises can also use AI technology to reduce the investment of individual and organizational resources and reduce risks, so as to cope with the above challenges. Specifically, AI can play a role in the following aspects.
First, resource release. AI can replace the members of the organization to complete a lot of basic work, thus greatly freeing up the time and energy resources of individuals. With AI, creative individuals may be able to spend 15% and 20% more time on more innovative work and activities than 3M and Google do. It is also beneficial for the organization to obtain possible innovation outputs through the reallocation of energy resources rather than additional inputs.
Second, cross-functional (business) innovation. In general, there are two ways in which a business can achieve cross-functional (business) innovation. One is to form formal, cross-functional (business) innovation task teams that generate ideas through the active interaction of team members with diverse backgrounds. At that time, Bell Labs arranged for theoretical experts and practical experts to work together to stimulate innovation by creating a good communication environment. The other is to promote cross-functional (business) innovation by cultivating cross-functional (business) talent. Formal job rotations, or the more flexible Facebook-like Hand-A-Month program (where an employee can apply to work in another group or team for a month) can help develop cross-functional (business) talent, but the economic, administrative, and psychological costs of the organization are high. AI offers a new possibility for cross-functional (business) innovation at lower cost and with less risk, and we are already seeing AI practices where humans and digital executives participate in high-level meetings.
Third, creative evaluation. At present, most of the evaluation of employees' ideas is done by the expert team and the management team, and the cognitive ability and subjective preferences of the evaluators, as well as organizational and political factors, often affect the evaluation results. As an evaluator of ideas, AI has advantages in establishing fair perception and overcoming individual subjective preferences and cognitive limitations. Of course, the final creative decision still needs to be made by the organization's managers, and the decision-making function cannot be replaced by AI.
epilogue
Artificial intelligence technology is becoming more and more widely used in various kinds of work within organizations, and individuals engaged in different jobs have different feelings about it, and mixed feelings may become the norm. However, whether it is an individual or an organization, it is preferable to respond proactively.
From the individual level, according to the research of Li Ning et al., the realization of in-depth cooperation between employees and AI is far beyond the scope of simple technical application, and it is necessary to re-explore and define individual capabilities. Individuals need to benefit from AI-assisted collaboration, or even collaboration, and focus their energy and resources on more original breakthrough creations or more subtle incremental creations, and enhance relevant capabilities and qualities.
From an organizational point of view, creating an innovation culture and creating an innovation environment is still an old proposition under the new situation. However, in the context of turbulent external environment, enhanced resource constraints, and conservative risk appetite, it is worth exploring how to reduce the resource investment and risk of employees and organizations with the help of AI, after all, organizational innovation is the foundation for organizations to maintain competitive advantage.
About the Author | Wang Xueli: Tenured Associate Professor, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University;
Han Chen: Ph.D. student, Department of Leadership and Organizational Management, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University;
Wu Yukun is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Management, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University.
Editor-in-Charge | Liu Yongxuan ([email protected])
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