Innovations Leveraging Artificial Intelligence, Stakeholder Engagement, and Innovation Value: An Investment Model Perspective

Despite the exponential growth of innovations that leverage artificial intelligence (AI), the understanding of how different firm stakeholders engage with these innovations lags behind, exposing an important gap in the literature. Bridging this gap, this interdisciplinary Special Issue explores the growing role that AI-leveraging innovations play in cultivating stakeholders' engagement, as elucidated in nine articles featured in this Issue. To theoretically ground the articles, we develop an organizing framework that integrates the investment model's notions of intrinsic and extrinsic (resource) investments and resource investment-based stakeholder engagement. We conceptualize stakeholders' (a) intrinsic engagement as their (e.g., cognitive/emotional) resource investment in their interactions with AI-leveraging innovations, and (b) extrinsic engagement as their resource investment in maintaining or growing the result(s) of their prior interactions with these innovations, taking a more relational perspective. The framework also assesses the predicted differential effect of thinking (vs. feeling) AI-leveraging innovations on the association of stakeholders' (a) intrinsic (extrinsic) engagement with AI-leveraging innovations and their perceived innovation value, and (b) their perceived innovation value and trust in the innovation, as formalized in a set of propositions. We conclude by linking the featured articles to the propositions, and outlining research priorities in this emerging interdisciplinary topic area.