Anyone leading in innovation will tell you that managing the complete idea lifecycle is an uphill battle. Case in point: Planbox’s 2022 State of Corporate Innovation report reveals that the top three roadblocks innovation professionals encounter in managing their innovation pipeline are:

  1. Turning the best concepts into tangible business outcomes
  2. Governance and decision-making
  3. Getting people to submit, collaborate on and develop ideas

top 3 innovation challenges

It’s really no surprise considering that innovation management is both complex and messy—complex on the one hand because it requires structure and messy on the other because it requires creativity. It almost sounds like an oxymoron, but with the help of generative AI systems like ChatGPT—OpenAI’s advanced AI language model that’s all the rage these days—you can take a lot of weight off your shoulders by streamlining your innovation processes, so you can have a bit more structure and creativity without the headaches. So let’s look at some practical ways you can maximize your innovation potential and overcome the top 3 innovation challenges with the help of ChatGPT.

Bring Ideas to Life

With ChatGPT’s advanced processing capabilities, you can reduce the time it takes to generate ideas while also coming up with more disruptive ones. Think about it: ChatGPT can comb through vast amounts of data around industry trends, consumer behaviors, or emerging technologies, or even help you perform market research and competitive analysis—all in a blink of an eye. With the right queries, your team can drill down into ChatGPT’s output to capture weak signals, and from these, create insights that lead to opportunities for new products, services, and business models which, incidentally, is the top outcome innovation professionals expect from their innovation management activities this year, as per the 2022 State of Corporate Innovation report. Thus, what used to take hours or days can now be achieved effectively within minutes, and lead to better quality ideas that have a greater potential of being converted into tangible business value.

Improve Decision-Making

What informs your innovation strategy? What inspires your team’s creativity? What drives decision-making? There are many possible answers, but what it boils down to is data, data, data. Without information to guide us, we can’t really leap forward, let alone take the next step. Taking advantage of ChatGPT, like innovation, is both an art and a science that requires a disciplined approach and out-of-the-box thinking to ensure the repeatability of results. Easier said than done, but not impossible. Think of it like this: In the same way that Googling requires some level of proficiency, so too does “ChatGPTing” (is that a word?). Effective decision-making means being proactive, that is to say, being on the lookout for opportunities, patterns, risks, and threats on a continual basis—and what better way to stay ahead of the game, especially in a rapidly changing business environment, than to stay on top of data? By leveraging ChatGPT’s powerful capabilities in this regard, your innovation team will be in a stronger position to know which ideas to prioritize and pursue within the broader portfolio of innovation projects. Simply ask the right questions, and you’ll get the right answers.

Get People Engaged

Asking people to take time out of their day to submit and collaborate on ideas is a whole other challenge in and of itself. Sure, you can incentivize innovative behaviors using game mechanics, or embed innovation into everyday tasks using integrations, but there’s no one size fits all. Innovation professionals will usually opt to use a combination of features and tools at their disposal, and ChatGPT should be the latest addition to their arsenal. There’s no denying that submitting an idea requires some degree of time and effort, regardless of how your innovation workflows are set up. So what if we can streamline this process for your contributors? Encouraging the use of ChatGPT within the context of your innovation program will not only serve as a source of inspiration for your contributors (therefore improving idea quality), but also enable faster idea submissions and an increase in idea quantity. This could be an effective mechanism for recruiting a larger number of people in your collaborative innovation activities as they will have the confidence to do a lot more in much less time.

Staying on top of the latest trends and technologies is the essence of being future-fit. If you find yourself lagging behind, then your best bet is to be a fast adopter. If you’re in the latter category, the good news is that ChatGTP is still in its infancy, so there’s still time to embrace the Generative AI revolution. Integrating it within your innovation processes will require an adjustment period as you learn the ropes, but once you get the hang of it, your innovation efforts can experience a significant boost.

Whereas some may see generative AI systems as antithetical to human ingenuity and imagination, others may see it as a force multiplier. Here at Planbox, we tend to side with the latter. Of course, ChatGPT won’t give you transformational business ideas on demand, but in the right (human) hands, you can realistically get close to that, and much faster, too.


Lucas Potasso-Justino

Chief Editor for the Future-Fit Manifesto and Content Marketing Specialist at Planbox. I write stuff that inspires front-line innovators to create a more impactful innovation management program. Follow me on LinkedIn.