From Ideation to Launch: How Generative AI Reshapes Product Development in Creative Industries

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reshapes product development in creative industries through an in-depth case study of a German women’s fashion and lifestyle brand. The study addresses a gap in existing research by analyzing how GenAI reconfigures product development as a process structured by prediction, judgment, and action in a context where tacit knowledge, symbolic value, and authenticity are central. Using a qualitative single embedded case design, the analysis draws on semi-structured interviews with eight participants across design, buying/wholesale, depot/retail, marketing, e-commerce, and IT functions. The study conceptualizes product development as a structured sequence of prediction, judgment, and action, and draws on the complementary lenses of tacit knowledge and organizational identity and symbolic boundary work. The findings identify four main patterns. First, GenAI supports hybrid creativity by accelerating early-stage visualization and option generation, while embodied expertise remains the primary standard for evaluating outputs. Second, GenAI redistributes prediction-intensive and creative tasks across functions, broadening participation but also creating coordination demands and tensions around creative authority. Third, GenAI use is strongly channel-specific, accepted more readily in internal, wholesale, and e-commerce contexts than in core brand-facing channels where authenticity and bodily presence are treated as critical. Fourth, GenAI reconfigures the temporal structure of development through a “pincer effect,” compressing early exploration while extending mid-process flexibility and intensifying deliberation at key selection stages. This thesis contributes a process-level account of GenAI as part of an evolving sociotechnical configuration in creative product development. It shows how augmented creativity, tacit knowledge, and symbolic boundary work are renegotiated as organizations integrate GenAI into everyday practice, redistributing tasks while intensifying rather than replacing human judgment.