AI-Driven Ideation: Evaluating the Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Enhancing Solo Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Solo entrepreneurs, who start and run a business without co-founders or employees, face intense resource limitations in generating, screening and developing business ideas. Since 2018, artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly, and large transformer-based generative models (for example GPT-3, Codex and DALL-E) now offer these founders an on-demand "cognitive partner". This conceptual paper develops an integrative framework to explain how the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) influences the quality of solo entrepreneurs' ideation and, through ideation, their opportunity development and venture readiness. Drawing on literature published between 2018 and 2022, grounded in the resource-based view, effectuation and the technology acceptance and social cognitive traditions, the paper argues that (i) GenAI adoption positively influences ideation performance, and (ii) the link between ideation and venture readiness is mediated by entrepreneurial self-efficacy and moderated by the founder's AI literacy. Two hypotheses and two research questions are proposed, a research agenda is presented, and implications for solo founders, educators, platform providers and policymakers are discussed. The contribution of the paper is to direct attention to AI as a substitute for missing team resources in single-founder ventures, rather than as a firm-level tool. The purpose of the study is to identify the barriers faced by aspiring solo entrepreneurs and to examine how generative AI can help overcome them.