Leveraging Generative AI in Entrepreneurship
Generative AI (GenAI) is changing everything, including entrepreneurship. Researchers in all fields have been studying how this technology reshapes a variety of activities, many of which are relevant to entrepreneurship. Here I collect and discuss the ongoing research on how to leverage GenAI in entrepreneurship. I organize this material in four areas: basics, ideation, research, and experimentation. Obviously, this is NOT a comprehensive list, just my view on the topic. This post was published on January 12th 2025, and is going through numerous iterations. If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you at andreacontigiani2019@gmail.com.
1 — Basics
Ethan Mollick is probably the best starting point to understand how to use GenAI:
- https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/getting-started-with-ai-good-enough
- https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/thinking-like-an-ai
- https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/innovation-through-prompting?utm_source=publication-search
Here are some interesting discussions on how GenAI might reshape entrepreneurship:
2 — Ideation, Problem Solving, and Theorizing
GenAI has significant potential in idea generation:
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4526071
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4533642
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn5290
More broadly, GenAI is helpful in problem solving activities:
More broadly, GenAI could be a helpful tool in “theorizing” (aka, building structured perspectives around a problem, often a good way to come up with a good business idea):
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4978831
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4737265
Finally, a good way GenAI could be helpful is to give entrepreneurs feedback on their early ideas:
3 —Research, Customer Discovery, and Competitive Analysis
GenAI seems to have a lot of potential for market research:
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4683054
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=4395751
- (cautionary note) https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19599
Plus, here are some interesting applications outside business:
4— Experimentation, Prototyping, and Strategy
Some interesting work on how to leverage GenAI for protyping:
Finally, GenAI might be a good tool to help entrepreneurs make strategic decisions:
