Digital innovation and the effects of artificial intelligence on firms’ research and development – Automation or augmentation, exploration or exploitation?

Digitalization has altered many assumptions underpinning research on innovation management. At the early innings of exploring how digital innovation management stands out, there is a need for further studies in this area. Previous research on how firms use artificial intelligence has distinguished between automation and augmentation of human activities. In this paper, we explore how firms implement artificial intelligence within research and development. Utilizing an international news database spanning 956 articles from 122 newspapers published in 2020, we find that artificial intelligence is primarily adopted to augment human activities (55%) within research and development, rather than to automate matters…