Disruptive innovation is widely recognised as a bold enterprise. Risks and uncertainties drive incumbent firms to seek alternative solutions to find disruptive ideas. Machine learning emerges as a powerful tool to reduce uncertainties while processing vast amounts and types of information. However, incumbents encounter immense difficulty in codifying tacit knowledge into effective algorithms and often end up with incremental or tactical outcomes despite bold aspirations. Using the literature on problem finding, we explore the development process of machine learning for ideation. Our action research conducted on a healthcare firm provides theoretical and managerial contributions. First, this study suggests that ideation for disruptive innovation benefits from machine learning by facilitating a heuristic search in which a group of actors evaluate plausible hypotheses rather than seek logically accurate conclusions. Previous studies on ideation stress directional search. Second, we propose an ideation process centred on problem formulation to identify disruptive innovation based on its inherent characteristics (e.g., radical functionality and discontinuous technical standard). Third, we discuss the challenges of adopting algorithm-based systems in the ideation — a process well known for being fuzzy.