Dear colleagues,
Industry and Innovation would like to invite you to submit an article for our upcoming special issue on "Open Innovation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Reshaping Knowledge Search, Collaboration, and Governance".
We are seeking original research articles that support an understanding of the role of AI technologies in creating new opportunities for firms to innovate, to redesign industry boundaries, and generate new value systems and partnership networks.
We invite scholars to move beyond the "what digital tools?" question to engage with the "how" and "why" they alter open innovation dynamics. We particularly encourage submissions that move beyond descriptive applications of AI to investigate its role as a driver of partner selection, coordination, and knowledge integration.
The guest editors Saverio Barabuffi (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy), Giulio Ferrigno (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy), Letizia Mortara (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom), Yogesh K. Dwivedi (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia) invite contributions on the following topics and research questions:
1. AI and Inbound Open Innovation: Partner Search and Knowledge Scouting
- How do AI-based tools reshape the classic trade-off between search breadth and depth in open innovation? Can algorithmic scouting explore distant knowledge domains more efficiently than traditional methods?
- To what extent can AI overcome local search biases, revealing latent complementarities across industries, regions, or technologies that human managers may overlook?
- Can AI-powered analysis of diverse data sources-such as patents, scientific publications, open-source code, or social media-democratize access to innovation ecosystems, or does it favor incumbents with larger digital footprints?
2. Orchestration & Governance of Innovation Networks
- How do AI tools enable algorithmic governance of knowledge flows in multi-partner networks?
- How can AI help coordinate heterogeneous actors, including firms, universities, NGOs, and governments, within mission-oriented innovation systems?
- How are platforms leveraging AI-tools to shape technological trajectories and orchestrate complementors in ecosystems?
- What are the implications of AI-mediated orchestration for value capture, appropriation, and transparency in collaborative innovation?
3. Knowledge Flows, Spillovers and Innovation Mapping
- How do generative AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques uncover tacit knowledge flows and early-stage spillovers invisible to traditional patent- or publication-based metrics?
- How do AI tools improve the mapping of technological landscapes, identify "white spaces", and detect emerging trajectories to inform strategic decisions such as make, buy, or ally?
- What methods best integrate multiple data streams (e.g., patents, publications, mobility, digital signals) to track cross-sectoral and cross-regional knowledge diffusion enabled by AI?
4. AI-Enabled Absorptive Capacity and Human AI interaction
- How should absorptive capacity be reconceptualized when AI tools, such as LLMs, assist in the recognition of external knowledge?
- What is the optimal division of labor between AI systems and human R&D managers in scanning, interpreting, and assimilating external knowledge?
- How can AI support organizational learning while mitigating barriers such as the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, especially when AI identifies previously unknown sources of innovation?
Submission window: 1-30 September 2026
Contact details and full call: https://shorturl.at/Fzc3b
Best regards,
Alessandra Perri and Vera Rocha
Co-Editors-In-Chief
Industry and Innovation
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Alessandra Perri
Luiss University
Rome
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