Artificial Intelligenceis perhaps the most promising architectural innovation in the 21st Century and will impact all aspects of society and businesses in far greater magnitude than any previous digital revolution(Makridakis, 2017). Given its powerful technological capabilities, AI is a promising enabler for organizations: It facilitates new venture creation processes (Nambisan, 2016), reshapes the nature of the innovation process and organization of R&D (Cockburn, Henderson, & Stern, 2018), augment management work (Kolbjørnsrud, Amico, & Thomas, 2016). Therefore, this track invites both conceptual and empirical research that examines the question of how AI can enable venture creation, innovation, and organizational change.
AI holds an immense potential to disrupt current practices in organizations. From the opportunities perspective, AI and its sub-category technologies (machine learning, deep learning, big data, predictive analytics, and process automation) can enable the pursuit of entrepreneurial activities (Nambisan, 2016; von Briel et al., 2017), reshape an organization’s innovation process by serving as a general purpose “method of invention” (Cockburn, Henderson, & Stern, 2018), and augment the added-value work of managers while freeing them from routinized tasks (Kolbjørnsrud t al., 2016). In terms ofchallenges, AI is bound to impact organization design, which begs the question of what decision making authority can or cannot be delegated to machines (Von Krogh, 2018). Indeed, once AI systems reach sufficient prediction power (Agrawal et al., 2018), they might substitute humans in increasingly more tasks (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014). Such a substitution will lead to many implications for an organization's business model, strategic implementation, leadership, work, design,structure(Agrawal et al., 2018, Jarrahi, 2018). As of today, it is unclear how and to what extent AI will constitute a threat to organizationsand the society. Such a concerns resonates well with the UN’s SDGs. The use and management of AI by organizations must be ethically-framed to enable the pursuit of business opportunities without compromising the prospect of better societies. In this call,we are particularly interested in conceptual and empirical work that examines the enabling role of AI for organizations and its associated challenges across three major disciplines.
The list is non-exhaustive as we welcome novel perspectives on this topic:
Entrepreneurship:
Innovation:
Ethics:
For more information please visit: http://www.euramonline.org/programme2020/strategic-interest-groups/sig-03-entrepreneurship-ent.html.