Generative Artificial Intelligence and Innovation

Purpose - This work defines Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) and discusses its conceptual foundations and developments in innovation research. It also sketches research propositions that contribute to a promising research agenda.Design/methodology/approach - The study consists of a conceptual reflection on academic and non-academic research articles that deal with forms of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Findings - This work generates several findings. First, defining Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) in innovation is a complicated task, one that has to rely on multiple disciplines that construe similar terms and concepts in a different way. As such, our definition is one that takes into account innovation outcomes such as product/service, process, and business model innovation, as they represent the most relevant outcomes of innovation in the business and management literature dealing with AI (Mariani, 2020; Mariani et al., 2022). Second, such a definition has to take into account: (1) the macro environment including the political, economic, social, technological, ecological and legal environment; (2) the industry encompassing organizations/firms, their suppliers, customers, competitors, complementors and potential entrants. This implies that different level of analysis should be adopted: the macro level (e.g., technological environment), meso level (e.g., technological resources, capabilities, culture at the firm level) and micro level (e.g., individual consumers' attitudes and preferences). Third, when conceptualizing the relationship between Gen-AI and innovation from a business perspective, a framework helping to identify benefits and critical challenges of Generative AI for business innovation is missing. Fourth, as Gen-AI will originally complements (instead of replacing) human-led innovation, important issues to address are: (1) how humans - be them innovation managers, customers and new product testers - and Gen-AI will interact for product, process, and business model innovation; (2) if and how new products/services and processes generated by AI will be patented; (3) if and how intellectual property generated by AI will be protected; (4) who will retain intellectual property for new business ideas, patents, as well new products/services and processes stemming from Gen-AI; (5) if and how innovation managers will make sure that the use of Gen-AI will be ethical and moral given the ongoing relevant debate around the morality of AI (Floridi & Sanders, 2004); (6) who will control if new products/services and processes stemming from Gen-AI are authentic, do not infringe others' IP and comply with laws and regulations; (7) if and to what extent Gen-AI brings about incremental rather than radical innovation; (8) how long it will take for Gen-AI to lead to breakthrough innovation; (9) how shall business models be modified to support Gen-AI; (10) how organization boundaries should be modified to accommodate Gen-AI; (11) if a Gen-AI department or office should be created along the R&D one.Research limitations/implications - This work critically synthesizes academic and non-academic research on generative AI. Policy and managerial implications for innovation managers and entrepreneurs are put forward. Some of them enrich recent empirical and anecdotal evidence on the use of AI for tasks such as writing articles (GPT-3, 2020; Floridi & Chiriatti, 2020), developing deepfakes (Floridi, 2021) and developing a range of other “new” products (Marr, 2022; Sparkes, 2022). Our conceptual development seems to suggest that Gen-AI can at best help innovation managers to: (1) identify the best among different solutions to a customer problem; (2) identify the best among different customer problems. However, and consistently with extant critical perspectives on AI vs. intelligence (Floridi, 2017), Gen-AI's ability to solve problems in the innovation domain more effectively than humans should not eb confused with intelligent ways through which Gen-AI, by itself, can generate new products/services and processes. Originality/value - This study contributes to define and conceptualize Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) in relation to innovation in the business and management field, and discusses its conceptual foundations and developments in business research. It also sketches research propositions that contribute to build a promising research agenda.