Reinventing Innovation Management: The Impact of Self-Innovating Artificial Intelligence

Through recent leaps in application, artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most promising digital technologies, attracting significant attention from scholars and practitioners alike. Prior innovation research has mainly focused on the opportunities for and challenges to infusing digital technologies into the innovation process. However, understanding the general effects of digital technologies is insufficient as their specific fields of application differ. AI is distinct from other digital technologies, given its potential to evolve into both a general-purpose technology and a method of inventing, and several firms are beginning to integrate AI into their innovation processes. We capture this phenomenon by introducing a concept we term self-innovating artificial intelligence (SAI), defined as the organizational utilization of AI with the aim of incrementally advancing existing or developing new products, based on insights from continuously combining and analyzing multiple data sources. As SAI is about to fundamentally change how innovations are created, this article describes the underlying AI technology; conceptualizes and outlines how firms may incorporate SAI into their innovation processes with the aim of developing increasingly complex products; and offers potential avenues for further research in this intriguing domain.