AI Enabling Entrepreneurship: Comparison of Theoretical Frameworks

Liu Zhiyang; Wang Zemin

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20201020.101

Summary

Artificial intelligence（AI）, a new type of intellectual capital, has emerged in the Industry 4.0 era, which not only promotes the emergence of new dominant technology paradigm, but also brings great challenges to the creation behavior of new ventures in various countries. Although scholars have noticed that AI, as an important part of digital technology, may have an impact on entrepreneurship theory and practice, AI enabling entrepreneurship has not been considered as an independent research field of entrepreneurship yet, and the theoretical research on AI enabling entrepreneurship also lags behind the development of AI enabling entrepreneurship practice.

Different from the traditional entrepreneurial process, AI enabling entrepreneurship refers to the process in which entrepreneurs actively utilize or collaborate with AI to jointly exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. AI enabling entrepreneurship not only gives birth to new entrepreneurial practice problems, but also fundamentally challenges the classical entrepreneurial theory. Firstly, this article analyzes the impact of AI on entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurial opportunity, business model and entrepreneurial team through the systematic review, and on this basis summarizes the first generation model of AI enabling entrepreneurship, that is, the existing research integration framework. Secondly, the research framework of AI-driven entrepreneurship from artificial narrow intelligence（ANI）to artificial general intelligence（AGI）is constructed based on the new perspective of AI internalization. According to the framework, AI realizes the integration of entrepreneurial elements such as entrepreneurial preference, entrepreneurial resource, entrepreneurial team and business model based on the man-machine coordination. At this stage, AGI is not only an entrepreneurial tool, but also an entrepreneurial partner, which can accelerate the entrepreneurial process and improve the quality of entrepreneurship. However, AI enabling entrepreneurship may also bring potential damage, so it is necessary to introduce regulatory barriers to prevent. Finally, combined with the existing literature, the possible research topics in the future are proposed.

Compared with the previous literature, this paper makes innovative contributions in the following three aspects: Firstly, this paper integrates the scattered research at this stage, and builds the early research framework of AI enabling entrepreneurship, which is of great theoretical significance for promoting the systematic research in the AI enabling entrepreneurship field. Secondly, breaking through the previous view that AI is only regarded as the main body of entrepreneurial activities, this paper emphasizes that AI should become an entrepreneurial partner, and AGI can internally accelerate the realization of the integration of entrepreneurial preference, entrepreneurial resource, entrepreneurial team and business model, which is also the innovative significance of the traditional entrepreneurial factor theory of the new paradigm of entrepreneurship in the era of AI. Finally, two important practical values of cultural norms and government supervision in the application process of AI entrepreneurship are proposed.