The Innovation Advantage GenAI Can’t Give You

For most of modern business times, competitive advantage belonged to whoever had the best ideas. Better ideas meant better products, which meant more customers, which meant more revenue and profit. The entire innovation industry — consultancies, design firms, brainstorming retreats fueled by sticky notes and gallons of La Croix — was built on this premise: If you could generate more and better ideas than your competitors, you would win.

That advantage has been vaporized by AI.

Generative AI has turned ideation into a full-blown utility. Today, anyone with a $20 subscription to a GenAI tool can instantly generate 100 product concepts. That has rendered the raw material of innovation — ideas — as abundant, accessible and cheap as electricity. And here's the thing about electricity: Nobody competes on it. You compete on what you build with it. Which means the competitive advantage has shifted upstream, from the solution to the problem — specifically, to how you identify and frame the problem in the first place.

Please select this link to read the complete article from MIT Sloan Management Review.