An AI Sidekick for Ideation: From 'what if' to a working prototype in 2 days

Strategic ideation is often associated with brainstorming, sticky notes and the subsequent blackhole where good ideas go to die. It should be about aligning innovative ideas with an organisations ambitions, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and generating the buy-in needed to transform these ideas into reality. At Tomoro, we’ve developed an approach to ideation using AI as a catalyst, turning abstract visions into a prioritised set of coherent, prototype-able ideas within a few hours.

In this blog we explore the value of involving business leaders in a more action-oriented approach to identifying opportunities for generative AI, the common challenges that hold organisations back and the AI-enabled process we’ve developed to overcome them.

The value of strategic ideation#

Strategic ideation is the process of generating and prioritising creative or innovative ideas that align with an organisation's overall strategy, leveraging the insights and expertise of business leaders to inform decision-making, foster interdisciplinary collaboration, and generate sponsorship. Involving leaders in strategic ideation, particularly in relation to AI, has several key benefits:

1. Allowing leaders to explore ways to utilise generative AI helps them understand the possibilities and limits of the technology and how they can continue to explore opportunities. Nobody knows exactly where the boundaries of the technology are today or where they will be in 3 months time - so helping leaders understand and take advantage of the fact they play a fundamental role in continuous AI research and development is extremely valuable.
2. Giving leaders an understanding of the technology and the chance to explore possibilities provides them with the ability to integrate AI as part of their core business strategy. Leaders with knowledge of generative AI and its application can make more informed decisions regarding investment, implementation and strategic value.
3. People tend to support what they help to create. Providing opportunities for leaders to identify meaningful ways for AI to solve problems and contribute to the realisation of strategic ambitions drives greater levels of commitment go and do something with the idea. The right kind of ideation experience creates motivation to test and learn, not just to ideate.

The problem is that ideation sessions don’t always result in these kinds of benefits. Often, ideas stay firmly in the conference room, stuck on post-it notes.

What normally happens today#

Leaders gather together in a conference room. There’s coffee. People talk about ideas for innovative solutions and applications of a particular technology or a combination of solutions. Captured on hundreds of sticky notes, participants try to articulate their ideas or use cases clearly, sifting through the vast array of (physical or digital) sticky notes to pick a few winners. Whether or not we make it to thematic analysis or prioritisation, one thing almost always happens - the sticky notes (or rather ideas) disappear, never to be seen again.

The hard part of innovation isn’t coming up with an idea; rather it’s acting on an idea and being bold (and quick)enough to learn from it.

There are great frameworks and processes to help facilitate meaningful ideation. No matter how good the framework, there are barriers, challenges and common errors that stop strategic ideation from becoming a meaningful (learning) experience, especially when it comes to applications of artificial intelligence:

• Ideation often starts by discussing how we could use AI when the starting point should be business problems that need to be solved or strategic opportunities we want to take.
• Even when we start with problems and opportunities, without exploring, playing with and understanding the technology, it’s incredibly difficult for leaders to generate coherent ideas. This means ideas tend to be abstract or incoherent visions rather than possibilities we can act on today.
• We tend to focus on generating lots of ideas, because quantity is favoured over quality. However, this makes prioritisation very difficult, often resulting in a disconnection between the ideas themselves, down selection and action.
• Leaders are time-poor, which means that high-potential ideas, prioritisation, and commitment to the next steps must happen very quickly. Finally, enterprises often lean towards innovation by committee. The most common next step after ideation involves a steering group or forum, which creates a barrier between idea and action.

Ultimately, ideation is often disconnected from testing, learning and proving whether or not an idea is valuable. The key to realising enterprise value from generative AI lies in actually using it - this means we need to close the gap between the idea and quick experiments.

At Tomoro, we’ve hacked strategic ideation, using AI as an accelerator so that it can be done in an hour. And all leaders need to do is talk - sharing the problems and opportunities from which powerful ideas can emerge.

What we do#

We want to shorten the distance between understanding the possibilities for AI and doing something meaningful with those possibilities. In the shortest possible time frame, we showcase what AI can and cannot do, demystify different AI technologies, and provide moments of inspiration. Accelerating the process meaningfully involves providing leaders with ways to explore AI solutions relevant to their challenges, sparking the creative thinking process and connecting possibilities to real-world problems.

This is where our ‘Ideation Sidekick’ comes in. We use AI to augment the ideation process, freeing people up to focus on conversation and co-creation while moving quickly. Below, we explain how AI can help us go from zero (limited or no concept of where AI might add value) to one (a first prototype or test) in a matter of days, not months.

AI as a Thinking Partner & Facilitator#

Our Ideation Sidekick has several “modes” - offering multiple ways for people to work with it. It will never generate ideas for you, rather it will help to facilitate the process of connecting problems and opportunities with possible applications of AI. In addition, our AI assistant also provides opportunities to “look under the hood”; for example, to explore how it uses business context and Chain of Thought reasoning to support thinking processes.

On the one hand, it’s a tool to amplify human ideation; on the other, it’s an opportunity to learn through hands-on experience and play with the technology

Exploring What Ifs

Our AI sidekick helps trigger the creative process by generating ‘What If’ questions. These questions invite participants to explore the ways generative AI may (or may not) help solve specific problems or unlock new opportunities, all within the context of strategic objectives and actual business challenges. Users simply describe a challenge or opportunity, and the agent generates questions.

People discuss possible answers to these questions in small groups, where our AI assistant acts as a stimulus, prompting people to develop novel approaches that would be unlikely to surface based on people’s experiences alone.

Ideation Sidekick, Exploring What Ifs

Refining ideas

The Ideation sidekick can provide participants with feedback, helping them refine their concepts by surfacing assumptions, highlighting missing information, or extending an idea. The sidekick makes suggestions and draws on its understanding of the business or function to surface discrepancies between the idea and strategic direction and ensure that the idea is coherent.

As well as refining the idea itself, the AI assistant also helps people to structure and articulate their concepts consistently, meaning that people can focus far more on the idea itself than writing it down in a way other people will understand. The Ideation Assistants ability to “template” ideas is extremely valuable in accelerating the process without compromising creative thinking - the assistant applies necessary constraints to facilitate the process.

Ideation Sidekick, Refining Ideas

Playback and prioritisation

The AI sidekick will also help to gather ideas from multiple groups or individuals, bringing them together in one place to facilitate sharing and prioritisation. Groups can explore patterns across ideas, identify the most valuable, exciting opportunities and prioritise a handful of opportunities to take forward by voting for candidate solutions.

In this sense, our assistant is acting as a curator. Storing ideas, allowing people to refer to them easily and even finding patterns, relationships and themes between them very quickly

Ideation Sidekick, Playback and Prioritisation

From ‘What Ifs’ to Working Prototypes#

We developed our Ideation Sidekick to behave in two key ways to maximise the value of time spent ideating, increasing the quality of concepts and reduce the distance between ideas and action.

Acting as a thinking partner sparks creative exploration, provides feedback and surfaces assumptions to make ideas more coherent.

Acting as a facilitator reduces the need for humans to give energy to administrative tasks, and early ideas into a set of clear, prioritised, and ready-to-prototype solutions.

By combining human creativity with AI, organisations can move from ideation to prototyping much more quickly, ensuring valuable ideas are effectively developed and put into action. But, our approach and application of AI isn’t just about strategic ideation being done more quickly. It’s about using AI to learn about AI and reducing barriers that might ordinarily stop us from discovering what will or won’t realise value.