Whose Idea Is It, Anyway?

AI has made brainstorming remarkably easy. Even a rough description of a problem produces several ideas to work with, saving much of the effort of getting started. Some of that effort, though, may play a significant role in how people become interested in an idea. Recent research suggests that using AI early in the ideation process affects how connected people feel to the concepts they develop and how much they want to see them through.

Researchers at Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab explored this through two brainstorming experiments. In the larger study, several hundred knowledge workers came up with unusual uses for a paperclip. Those using AI generated more ideas initially. A smaller experiment brought the exercise closer to everyday work, asking a group of HR business partners to develop ideas about talent retention and organizational design.

Some began with AI, while others spent the first half of the session thinking independently. Both used AI to finish. Those who started with AI made more progress early on, but by the end, the groups received roughly comparable creativity scores. The interesting thing is how their feelings about the work differed. All participants who answered the follow-up survey felt greater ownership of the ideas they’d begun developing themselves, and a majority found that approach more rewarding. It’s a small experiment. Similar results left people with different feelings about what they’d accomplished.

That sense of ownership matters when it’s time to do something with an idea. There’s still work involved in getting others interested and addressing their concerns. Feeling invested in the idea makes that effort seem worthwhile.

A related study at H&M examined that connection more closely. Researchers asked roughly 400 employees to develop proposals for using retail spaces sustainably. Everyone used AI, but the order varied. Some used it throughout, some began with it and finished independently, and others developed ideas on their own before bringing AI in.

Employees who began independently reported greater ownership of their ideas. Stronger ownership was also associated with greater willingness to promote a proposal through the company’s innovation program. The study measured what people said they were willing to do, so it doesn’t establish which ideas eventually made it into stores. However, it does suggest that the way an idea develops influences how people feel about taking it further.

The researchers also described changes in ownership as people worked with AI. Employees gained a stronger connection to AI-generated ideas by adding knowledge from their own work. In other cases, AI expanded an initial idea into something more comprehensive but more generic, weakening the connection to the person who’d originated it.

My take is that people need to recognize some of their own thinking in the result. The H&M employees developed a stronger connection to AI-generated ideas as they added their experience and knowledge. That leaves plenty of room for AI in the process. It also helps explain why an increasingly polished proposal doesn’t necessarily become more satisfying to work on.

There’s a temptation to treat the effort of getting started as an inconvenience. Sometimes it is. Starting with a blank sheet isn’t inherently valuable, and struggling with a problem doesn’t guarantee an interesting answer. But working through an idea involves deciding what matters and finding reasons to pursue it. It seems likely that this is where some of the interest in doing the work comes from.

I’d be interested to see which ideas people are still pursuing a month after those sessions. That would reveal something the finished proposals don’t capture: whether the process left people wanting to do the work ahead. AI saves time by helping people get past the early struggle of forming an idea. But what if some of that struggle was also how they came to care about it?

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Research references

• Sands, Molly. “Don’t outsource the spark: how to balance human thinking and AI.” Atlassian Teamwork Lab, September 21, 2026.
• Lazar, Moran, Hila Lifshitz, Rawan Qadri, Inbal Yahav, and Karim R. Lakhani. Ideas Are a Dime a Dozen with GenAI, but Who Will Champion Them? Gaining and Losing Idea Ownership in Human-AI Knowledge Work. Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 27-010, July 2026. Discussed in “Rethinking AI Innovation Ownership,” HBS AI Institute, September 10, 2026.