Co-Creating Value With Artificial Intelligence: A Bibliometric Approach to the Use of AI in Open Innovation Ecosystems

Open innovation, which blurs the boundaries of organizations using inflows and outflows of knowledge to boost their innovation processes, has transformed the innovation paradigm, evolving from higher degrees of protectionism to cooperative relationships. Nevertheless, frequently the management of the huge amount of information and data generated in an open innovation ecosystem requires the use of information and communication technologies. In this context, artificial intelligence can be a major help to profit from all the opportunities derived from open innovation. Considering the growing body of academic literature dealing with the use of artificial intelligence tools in the context of open innovation environments, the objective of this article is revealing the main references, the academic trends and the hottest topics dealing with this subject, disentangling the knowledge structure of the research through a bibliometric analysis carried out over 63 papers selected from Web of Science database, using both co-word analysis and bibliographic coupling. The recent burst in the academic production anticipates a potentially massive interest in this topic, which is studied by the literature at three different levels (operational, managerial, and social). This study reveals the existence of relevant research opportunities, specially related with the management of the potential conflicts that may stem from the fuzzy ownership of the data generated by an artificial intelligence, and the roles of the different agents in such context.