Publications
Publications
- 2019
Using Technology to Augment Professionals, Instead of Replacing Them, for Innovative Problem Solving
By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Felicia Ng, Aniket Kittur and Robert Kraut
Abstract
While in some technological and scientific areas innovation is flourishing, in others it is stalling, leaving important problems unsolved for decades. One explanation is professionals’ limitations as problem solvers, as accumulating depth of knowledge enhances one’s general problem-solving capabilities but also creates socio-cognitive fixation that hinders innovation. Recent technological changes have made it possible for non-professionals to innovate via online platforms and communities. Processes such as crowdsourcing suggest replacing professionals with crowds of non-professionals and potentially with learning algorithms. However, the crowdsourcing process also suffers from limitations, in particular in integration. In this paper, we closely investigate these problem-solving processes and test a new process based on using technology to augment R&D professionals instead of replacing them as problem solvers. We conducted a field study with R&D professionals from the Industrial Research Institute and crowds from Amazon Mechanical Turk, combining inductive qualitative methods with deductive experimental ones. We used an important real-world R&D problem of laundry water waste and found that the augmented R&D professionals’ process led to expanding the solution space exploration and generating more innovative solutions than either the R&D professionals only or the crowds only problem solving processes.
Keywords
Innovation; Expertise; Future Of Work; Crowdsourcing; Artificial Intelligence; Problem Solving; Professionalism; Experience and Expertise; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Problems and Challenges; Research and Development
Citation
Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila, Felicia Ng, Aniket Kittur, and Robert Kraut. "Using Technology to Augment Professionals, Instead of Replacing Them, for Innovative Problem Solving." Working Paper, March 2019.