Will Machines Innovate for and with Us - What Kind of Strategic Themes Could Belong to Innovation Automation?

The Internet economy and computer-aided innovation enable improvements in the quality and quantity of outcomes of innovation processes. Traditional “research pipes” are often too slow to fit with contemporary business logic. In this paper, we focus on the intersection of innovation and automation and the potential they create together. Innovation automation represents a next generation of automation that has structural implications. Automation in the innovation context is about maintaining the richness of creative innovation processes while also absorbing a greater amount of data, information, and knowledge inputs and producing more holistic outputs that meet customer needs better and are faster on the market. The paper builds a novel academic “playground” for the research on innovation automation as the efficient and effective use of co-creative intelligence—the fusion and mixture of artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and the intelligence of crowds. Covering the wide field of innovation automation requires various future research programs. The main focus areas in this paper are related to understanding innovation automation, enabling the way to new management of innovation and ecosystem development. We also propose relevant research themes for the future.