  In the future, most companies will be confronted with the topic of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and will have to decide on their strategy in this regards.
Currently, a lot of companies are thinking about whether and how AI and the
usage of data will impact their business model and what potential use cases
could look like. One of the biggest challenges lies in coming up with
innovative solution ideas with a clear business value. This requires business
competencies on the one hand and technical competencies in AI and data
analytics on the other hand. In this article, we present the concept of AI
innovation labs and demonstrate a comprehensive framework, from coming up with
the right ideas to incrementally implementing and evaluating them regarding
their business value and their feasibility based on a company's capabilities.
The concept is the result of nine years of working on data-driven innovations
with companies from various domains. Furthermore, we share some lessons learned
from its practical applications. Even though a lot of technical publications
can be found in the literature regarding the development of AI models and many
consultancy companies provide corresponding services for building AI
innovations, we found very few publications sharing details about what an
end-to-end framework could look like.
