Innovation Accounting & Product Led Growth – A Failed Experiment

By Elijah Eilert

I recently wrote an article called What is Innovation Accounting? Explained by Artificial Intelligence, and was surprised by how well the tool, called OpenAI, managed to describe what innovation accounting is. The challenge then arose to ask OpenAl to produce an article about innovation accounting by providing only subheaders as inputs for the tool that would then generate the paragraphs.

The result was an utter failure!

Releasing the results here would be an absolute waste of time for everybody. Instead, I came up with a pivot. In order to produce something half-decent (warning, the outcome is still not great), the below guidelines were applied to produce the article:

Other than the headers in the article, every sentence has to be generated by the tool.
No limit as to how often the tool can be prompted to generate text.
Sentences and paragraphs can be subtracted.
Single words can not be subtracted.

This is the (still pretty terrible) result:

Product Led Growth & Innovation Accounting

What is Product Led Growth?

When the iPhone was first released, it was met with critical acclaim. But no one could have predicted the success it would go on to achieve. The iPhone was a product-led growth story. The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and quickly became a best-selling product. Apple continued to improve the iPhone, releasing new models and features. The iPhone has helped to make Apple one of the most successful companies in the world. Apple has sold over 1 billion iPhones.

Product-led growth is a strategy that can be used by a company to grow its business. It involves creating and selling new or improved products to existing customers. Combining innovation accounting and product-led growth can help a company grow its business by optimizing its innovation efforts and by creating and selling new or improved products to existing customers.

How Innovation Accounting Enables Product-Led Growth

Innovation accounting is a tool that can be used to help a company track, measure, and optimize its innovation efforts. It can be used to help a company identify and track the financial returns from its innovation investments.

It can be difficult to accurately predict the future value of a new innovation. Additionally, even if the innovation is successful, it may take a long time for the company to see a return on their investment. Finally, it can be difficult to properly account for all of the risks and uncertainties associated with a new innovation.

Innovation accounting is a term used in business to describe a system of financial reporting that captures the value of innovations. The goal of innovation accounting is to provide a clear and consistent way to measure the financial performance of innovations. It can be difficult to accurately predict the future value of a new innovation. Additionally, even if the innovation is successful, it may take a long time for the company to see a return on their investment. Finally, it can be difficult to properly account for all of the risks and uncertainties associated with a new innovation.

Innovation accounting helps product led growth by measuring the impact of innovation on a company’s financial performance. This allows companies to track the return on investment for their innovation efforts and make better decisions about where to allocate resources. Innovation accounting also helps to identify which products are driving growth and assess the profitability of different segments of the business.

Stop!

This is where I had to stop. Producing these two paragraphs was time-intense, emotionally draining and intellectually unfulfilling.

As much as I want to leave this topic alone for a while, I am left with questions

Why was the outcome so catastrophic, compared to the first time using OpenAI?
Was insufficient time invested in learning how to use the tool?
Does the tool simply not have enough data to produce something meaningful here? In other words, has enough been written about innovation accounting and or product-led growth?
Have my inputs been the problem?

Next Step

I will look for someone who can help me understand the questions above a bit better and to either write another short article or record a podcast about the findings. If you can recommend someone, please introduce me or send me your suggestions. It would be interesting to learn a bit more about it. At least we might discover if I am asking the right questions to begin with!

Why was the outcome so catastrophic, compared to the first time using OpenAI?
Was insufficient time invested in learning how to use the tool?
Does the tool simply not have enough data to produce something meaningful here? In other words, has enough been written about innovation accounting and or product-led growth?
Have my inputs been the problem?