AI - an Untapped Opportunity for Innovation Developing a Screening Tool for AI and Innovation

Sammanfattning: It is known that innovation enables companies to penetrate new markets and achieve higher margins and that technology can contribute to achieving a competitive ad-vantage and growth for organizations. A technology that has as of recently grown to become relevant for organizations is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even so, previous studies have expressed the difficulty of implementing AI, which motivated this study. The main purpose of this study was to develop and test a screening tool that will work as a support in increasing an organization’s utilization of AI and innovation capability. During the course of the study, a great amount of focus was also put into conducting a preliminary analysis in preparation for a larger study that will be dependent on gathering large amounts of quantitative data. The research took on a three-phase-process. The first phase focused on gaining basic knowledge in regards to AI, innovation, technology management and model development. The findings in the first phase helped to formulate proper research questions that were applicable to the study. After that, the study moved on to the second phase which focused on a more in-depth literature study. This then led on to the development of an appropriate questionnaire for investigating factors that are relevant for AI and innovation, and an assessment model that would be connected to the questionnaire. The questionnaire was used for gathering responses that would be beneficial for the preliminary analysis in the form of a pilot study. The questionnaire and the assessment model together form a screening tool that gives a visual output of an organization’s position in regards to AI and innovation. The third and final phase included testing of the created screening tool, analyzing the findings from the pilot study and drawing conclusions from both the developed screening tool, and the results from the pilot study. The result from the literature study was the screening tool which takes five di-mensions into consideration that shows relevance to AI and innovation. These di-mensions are Structures, Resources, Methods, Action and Business,eachcontaining areas that exist in organizations that can be adjusted for the sake of the implemen-tation of AI and improvement of innovation management. The screening tool was tested on two separate organizations and managed to reflect these organizations’ AI progress through the assessment model. The screening tool was also applied to the pilot study which resulted in giving indications of what to expect when conducting a larger quantitative study. Despite the results gained from this study, it showed that further tests and studies need to be made in order to obtain more viable results. This study will act as a guideline for future studies to attain those results.