---
title: "Open innovation when the crowd is a model (research idea)"
description: "Open innovation and crowdsourcing appear on 71 recent papers, mostly in management, but only 3 of them carry an AI keyword. Firms ran idea contests and crowdsourcing platforms to get ideas from outside. If a language model can generate thousands of ideas in an hour, what is the crowd still for, and how do firms tell good ideas from fluent ones?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/open-innovation-with-generative-ai
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/open-innovation-with-generative-ai.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Open innovation when the crowd is a model (research idea): Open innovation and crowdsourcing appear on 71 recent papers, mostly in management, but only 3 of them carry an AI keyword."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["management", "innovation", "ai"]
keywords: ["open innovation", "crowdsourcing"]
---

# Open innovation when the crowd is a model

Open innovation and crowdsourcing appear on 71 recent papers, mostly in management, but only 3 of them carry an AI keyword. Firms ran idea contests and crowdsourcing platforms to get ideas from outside. If a language model can generate thousands of ideas in an hour, what is the crowd still for, and how do firms tell good ideas from fluent ones?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 71 papers carry an open-innovation or crowdsourcing keyword (39 in management journals, 11 in economics): "open innovation" on 42, "crowdsourcing" on 13, "open innovation ecosystems" on 5. Only 3 of the 71 also carry an artificial-intelligence, generative-AI, language-model or machine-learning keyword.

## Questions

- In idea contests, how do ideas from language models compare with crowd ideas on novelty, feasibility and what firms actually implement?
- Do participants in crowdsourcing platforms now submit AI-generated ideas, and does that raise the volume and lower the diversity of submissions?
- Does the value of open innovation shift from generating ideas to testing them with outside users?

## Data that could help

Submissions and outcomes from innovation contests and platforms, with timestamps around 2023, and experiments that mix model-generated and human ideas for blind evaluation.

## Next step

Run a blind evaluation in which managers rate a mix of crowd-sourced and model-generated ideas for a real problem, and track which ones they implement.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| open innovation | 2 | #1303 | 4, 4, 4, 3, 4, 3, 0, 2, 3, 5, 6, 3, 7, 2, 4, 4, 4, 2, 7, 9, 4, 3, 5, 5, 6, 2, 6, 4, 4, 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 1, 1, 2 | 142 |
| crowdsourcing | 1 | #2881 | 3, 2, 1, 4, 1, 1, 3, 2, 2, 5, 3, 4, 5, 2, 0, 5, 1, 1, 1, 3, 6, 4, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 5, 1, 2, 0, 3, 4, 1, 1 | 82 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Open innovation when the crowd is a model. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/open-innovation-with-generative-ai

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-open-innovation-with-generative-ai,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Open innovation when the crowd is a model},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/open-innovation-with-generative-ai}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).