Empowering consumer-led innovations and creative development with CrowdCraft™

In times where consumer needs and trends evolve faster than traditional innovation cycles, brands can no longer afford to guess what will resonate. They need to know from the onset.

By combining AI-enabled creativity with real-time validation, CrowdCraft turns consumer imagination into actionable, data-backed innovation. It’s not just about innovating or designing FOR consumers anymore. It’s about doing it WITH them, at speed and scale, to bring winning concepts to market that truly resonate. 

Imagine launching a new product. Your team develops several product ideas. You test them. One emerges as the winner. It launches. But what if there is something you missed?

When ideation mostly involves internal teams, category experts, or creative agencies, the range of ideas can remain limited by their shared inputs. Professionals – even the most experienced ones – tend to think within the boundaries of what seems feasible, relevant, or “on-brand”.

As a result, companies risk overlooking valuable insights, rooted in underlying needs, frustrations, and desires of consumers. When companies listen closely, it could uncover ideas that break conventions, combine unexpected needs, and solve problems professionals might otherwise overlook.

This is where the consumers’ voice changes the game. By involving consumers early in the innovation process, companies can tap into a wider spectrum of creativity by capturing ideas directly from the people who will eventually buy and use the product.

When this is implemented at scale, early collaboration ensures that the innovation funnel starts richer and more diverse, not narrower and more predictable.

The innovation shift: Leveraging generative AI

The traditional innovation process works in one direction: You develop concepts, show them to consumers, gather feedback, and refine. Consumers can only respond to what you’ve already developed.

CrowdCraft transforms innovation processes

With SKIM’s award-winning AI approach, CrowdCraft, hundreds or even thousands of consumers can be involved from the start. Consumers can share their ideas in natural language, and within seconds, CrowdCraft visualizes those ideas into tangible product concepts. Through several rounds of refinement, consumers can adjust and clarify until their idea appears exactly as they envisioned it.

Then comes the validation. Consumers evaluate their own creations alongside hundreds of others through robust choice exercises, quantifying which concepts have genuine market potential. This approach dramatically accelerates innovation cycles, ensures ideas resonate with consumers from the start, and backs creative decisions with data-driven insights – all at a scale that would be impossible with traditional methods.

Revealing what consumers truly want at scale

We invited consumers to discuss packaging designs using CrowdCraft. They were asked a series of playful and insightful questions such as:

• What toys did you love as a child?
• What excited you the most?
• Do you have preferences for shape, material, color, or even food?

Based on their responses, CrowdCraft generated visuals that brought these insights to life. Consumers then refined the creations until they were satisfied.

What emerged?

Ideas that surprised, delighted, and inspired! Concepts uncovered opportunities to align with local cultural nuances, segment-specific preferences, and niche audience appeal that standard creative processes typically miss.

The fundamental difference

The difference is breadth of exploration. With designer concepts, you’re testing specific directions based on professional judgment. With the consumer input, you’re mapping what resonates across a much broader landscape – uncovering patterns of what consumers truly crave at scale.

Why this approach works

Consumer collaboration isn’t new. AI image generation isn’t unique. What’s different is the combination of creativity and instant validation.

CrowdCraft does three things simultaneously:

• Unleashes creativity at scale: Consumers don’t just describe ideas; they are visualized instantly and then iteratively refined until they match their vision
• Robustly validates: Ideas aren’t just collected. They’re evaluated through trade-off exercises built on SKIM’s 45 years of leadership in choice modeling. This means you don’t just learn what consumers imagine, but also which ideas have the most potential.
• Identifies winning patterns: Advanced AI-based feature engineering and statistical modeling reveal why certain concepts perform well, creating actionable design principles, not just a ranked list.

This methodology recently won Best Paper Award at the Sawtooth Conference, recognizing its unique ability to deliver both creative output and methodological rigor.

Interested in trying CrowdCraft?

Contact us to try our demo platform