Artificial intelligence and corporate ideation systems
Selina L. Lehmann, Johannes Dahlke, Valentina Pianta, Bernd Ebersberger
kHUB post date: January 2026
Originally published: March 17, 2025 (PDMA JPIM • Vol 43, Issue 1 • January 2026)
Read time: 65 minutes
Access the Full Article
Many companies leverage the creativity of their employees to gather ideas for innovations. These ideas are collected, saved, and evaluated via platforms known as corporate ideation systems. Moderated ideation systems (ideation 2.0) emerged as a solution to address the limitations of traditional, rather passive ideation systems (ideation 1.0). In this study, we apply a qualitative mixed-method approach (literature review, company case studies, expert interviews, and focus group workshops) to examine how artificial intelligence (AI) technology may relieve the remaining pains of stakeholders in collaborative, moderated ideation systems. This leads to a new framework of corporate ideation systems, termed AI-based ideation systems (ideation 3.0). We identify five major pains suffered by stakeholders in today's moderated ideation systems: creativity pain, content formulation pain, search pain, analytical pain, and administration pain. We find that AI agents act as pain relievers when serving five supporting functions: inspirer, stylist, matchmaker, analyst, and organizer. The interconnected nature of pains means that employing AI agents in certain functions within corporate ideation systems can create positive externalities across the entire system. Practical insights into AI agent implementation and application in corporate ideation systems are provided by six mini-case studies, which lead to the proposition of two organizational principles: the contextualization of AI usage and the generalization of AI implementation as the requirements for successful ideation 3.0.
Practitioner Points
- This study shows that stakeholders in today's modern ideation systems (idea generators, contributors, evaluators, managers, and moderators) face five major pains: creativity pain, content formulation pain, search pain, analytical pain and administration pain.
- The findings of this paper examining five AI agents, helping to mitigate or overcome the above pains: inspirer, stylist, matchmaker, analyst and organizer.
- We propose the two organizational principles contextualization of AI usage and generalization of AI implementation to guide successful ideation 3.0 in practice.