This Special Issue is explicitly positioned around a question that existing work on AI-enabled knowledge search, collaboration management, and general AI governance has not yet answered: what happens when AI ceases to be a mere instrument and becomes an agent of innovation? This distinction — between AI-as-tool and AI-as-innovator — defines the conceptual boundary of our four research themes, which address the optimal human–AI division of innovative labour, the architecture of autonomously populated innovation ecosystems, the reimagination of absorptive capacity for an agentic era, and the fundamental challenges to IP posed by non-human inventorship.