The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Innovation

By Iain M. Cockburn, Rebecca Henderson, Scott Stern. The Economics of Artificial Intelligence, 2018

484 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The current economy's efficiency may be greatly improved by artificial intelligence. We distinguish between automation-oriented applications like robotics and the potential for recent developments in "deep learning" to serve as a general-purpose method of invention, finding strong evidence of a "shift" in the importance of application-oriented learning research since 2009. However, it may have an even larger impact by serving as a new general-purpose "method of invention" that can reshape the nature of the innovation process and the organization of R&D. We suggest that this will likely result in a significant shift away from routine, labor-intensive research and toward research that makes use of the interaction between improved prediction algorithms and passively generated large datasets. In addition, strong incentives for specific businesses to acquire and control crucial large datasets and application-specific algorithms will likely usher in a period of racing as a result of the potential commercial rewards of mastering this method of research. We suggest that in the future, policies that promote transparency and the sharing of core datasets between public and private actors may be essential for boosting research productivity and encouraging innovation-oriented competition.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Management Information Systems, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c1a26267b0d3cac6ac987cbaebd7cade50029eb

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In Information Systems and Management

In Management Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Going digital: implications for firm value and performance (2019, methodology): “Prior studies such as Brynjolfsson et al. (2017) and Cockburn et al. (2017) have argued that digital technologies increase the growth opportunities and productivity of firms.”
Artificial intelligence and energy intensity in China’s industrial sector: Effect and transmission channel (2021, background): “innovations such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, robots, and others (Cockburn et al., 2018), allowing an incremental number of tasks previously performed by human physical and brain power to be automated and significantly increasing efficiency and productivity (Aghio”
Artificial intelligence and big data in entrepreneurship: a new era has begun (2019, background): “Other AI programs are obviously able to help creating pieces of “real” art (Cohen 2018), and economists stress the great potential of AI for discovery and inventions (Aghion et al. 2017; Cockburn et al. 2018).”
Artificial intelligence, firm growth, and product innovation (2024, background): “As such, AI can be a general purpose technology that generates growth through increased productivity and product innovation (Aghion et al., 2017; Cockburn et al., 2018).”
The Employment Consequences of Robots: Firm-Level Evidence (2020, unknown): “As a recent and rapidly proliferating GPT (Brynjolfsson et al. 2018, Cockburn et al. 2018), robots have the potential to transform employment, firm practices, and the economy (Agrawal et al. 2018, McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2017).”
The De-democratization of AI: Deep Learning and the Compute Divide in Artificial Intelligence Research (2020, background): “…(AI) has been labeled a "general purpose technology" due to its pervasive role across many different industries (Cockburn, Henderson, & Stern, 2018), and has substantial implications for innovation and socio-economic development (Cockburn et al., 2018; Goolsbee, 2018; Korinek & Stiglitz, 2017).”
Measuring the Occupational Impact of AI: Tasks, Cognitive Abilities and AI Benchmarks (2020, background): “Others have a more positive perception according to which technological progress, as it has done in the past, will mostly enhance human labour and create new and better jobs (Cockburn et al., 2018).”
Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship: Implications for Venture Creation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2020, background): “Turning now to venture-level activities, Cockburn et al. (2018) suggest that AI is leading to a new “innovation playbook” that leverages large datasets and learning algorithms to precisely predict phenomenon.”
The Role of Cooperation in Responsible AI Development (2019, background): “AI also has the potential to be a general purpose technology—a technology that radically affects many sectors of the economy—and if this is the case we should expect its impact to be systemic (Brynjolfsson et al., 2018; Cockburn et al., 2018).”