Finding the Unicorn: Predicting Early Stage Startup Success through a Hybrid Intelligence Method

Artificial intelligence is an emerging topic and will soon be able to perform decisions better than humans. In more complex and creative contexts such as innovation, however, the question remains whether machines are superior to humans. Machines fail in two kinds of situations: processing and interpreting “soft” information (information that cannot be quantified) and making predictions in “unknowable risk” situations of extreme uncertainty. In such situations, the machine does not have representative information for a certain outcome. Thereby, humans are still the “gold standard” for assessing “soft” signals and make use intuition. To predict the success of startups, we, thus, combine the complementary capabilities of humans and machines in a Hybrid Intelligence method. To reach our aim, we follow a design science research approach to develop a Hybrid Intelligence method that combines the strength of both machine and collective intelligence to demonstrate its utility for predictions under extreme uncertainty.