Generative AI as a Co-Creator in Innovation Management

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping innovation management by moving beyond its conventional role as a technological tool toward becoming an active participant in creative and decision-making processes. This chapter examines how GenAI can function as a co-creator across the innovation process and explores the complementary roles of human and artificial intelligence in generating meaningful innovation outcomes. Adopting a structured integrative literature review approach, the study synthesizes recent research on GenAI-enabled innovation through thematic analysis and conceptual synthesis. The findings indicate that GenAI contributes across multiple stages of innovation, including opportunity recognition, idea generation and evaluation, product and service development, business model innovation, commercialization, and organizational innovation. Its primary strengths lie in rapid content generation, knowledge synthesis, recombination, scenario development, and iterative refinement, whereas human contributors remain central to problem framing, contextual interpretation, strategic and ethical judgment, validation, and accountability. Building on these complementary capabilities, the chapter proposes the Human–GenAI Innovation Co-Creation Framework, which conceptualizes innovation as an iterative cycle of framing, generating, evaluating, refining, validating, and experimenting. The analysis further identifies hallucination, bias and idea homogenization, intellectual property concerns, human over-reliance, AI literacy, and organizational governance as important boundary conditions shaping the effectiveness of co-creation. Overall, the chapter argues that the transformative potential of GenAI in innovation management lies not in replacing human innovators but in designing organizational processes that deliberately combine human judgment and creativity with GenAI’s generative and synthetic capabilities.