Can AI recognize innovation? In this talk, Dokyun Lee from Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University operationalizes arguments from the philosophy of creativity and theory of innovation literatures to argue that three different types of scientific innovation — combinational, exploratory, and transformative — can be distinguished by generative algorithms in an unsupervised, data-driven manner. Combinational innovations have grown at an exponential rate while creative innovations remain steady. Creative innovations have greater technological impact, but not market impact. He demonstrates that generative algorithms can identify different categories of human innovation, and underscores the potential utility of generative AI methods for business applications.

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