How should we govern digital innovation? A venture capital perspective

Jesús Salgado-Criado, Carlos Mataix-Aldeanueva, Santiago Nardini, Cecilia López-Pablos, Mara Balestrini and César Said Rosales-Torres

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2024, vol. 200, issue C

Abstract: Ethical and governance issues regarding digital innovations developments like Artificial Intelligence have attracted abundant debate and research. Many perspectives – societal, engineering, research, management and policymaking – have been extensively analysed in an attempt to understand the role of the different stakeholders in minimising risks and amplifying opportunities. Interestingly, however, the investment community has been scarcely studied, despite the critical role of financing in technology innovation. This paper attempts to characterize investors' perceptions around the concept of digital innovation governance. We present insights derived from qualitative research using constructivist grounded theory, based on a series of interviews to 23 venture capital investment managers. Analysis of the data collected suggests several categories of important factors regarding how venture capital managers engage in Digital Innovation Governance (DIG): legitimacy of involvement, opportunity of conducting and capability to lead DIG initiatives in the invested startups. We offer a structured inventory of venture capital manager insights and perceptions on innovation governance. According to our research, venture capital managers, and investors in general, find themselves capable of and see opportunities and relevance in effectively fostering a digital innovation governance that takes into account the potential risks of Artificial Intelligence and identifies business and societal opportunities.

Keywords: Digital innovation; Digital governance; AI governance; AI ethics; ESG (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162523008831
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:200:y:2024:i:c:s0040162523008831

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2023.123198

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().