2024 NSFC Management Science Special Program for "Research on Scientific Issues of Business Administration in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence"

2024 NSFC Management Science Special Program for "Research on Scientific Issues of Business Administration in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence"
2024年度国家自然科学基金委员会管理科学部专项项目指南——生成式人工智能时代的工商管理科学问题研究

October 9, 2024

The official announcement in Chinese

Sponsor:
National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)

About:
As a transformative technology, generative artificial intelligence has an increasing impact on business organizations. There are endless ideas about organizational system design, enterprise process reengineering, and business model innovation around generative artificial intelligence. At the same time, the emergence of new technologies has also raised many questions for corporate development: How will generative artificial intelligence technology change the organizational logic of various elements within the enterprise? How to use generative artificial intelligence technology to create corporate value and upgrade innovation? How to balance efficiency and risk to promote the effective operation and long-term development of people, money, and materials in the process of technology empowerment? As a discipline that studies enterprises, business administration needs to actively pay attention to cutting-edge technological changes and corporate problems, help Chinese companies take the lead in generative artificial intelligence technology innovation and application upgrades, and create international competitive advantages. To this end, the Management Science Department of the National Natural Science Foundation of China has established a special project called "Research on Scientific Issues in Business Administration in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence".

Scientific Goal:
This special program focuses on digital agent systems, strategic human capital resources, accounting information, new product development, and personalized marketing enabled by generative artificial intelligence. It deeply reveals the inherent mechanism and far-reaching impact of generative artificial intelligence in empowering business administration practice, encourages the use of interdisciplinary cooperation and data fusion technology that matches actual scenarios, promotes research paradigms and theoretical innovations in business administration, solves major key scientific problems faced by enterprises in applying generative artificial intelligence, and provides a solid theoretical foundation and practical guidance for the high-quality development of enterprises.

Funding Areas:

1. Research on the design and management mechanism of digital agent system based on generative artificial intelligence

Generative artificial intelligence has enabled multimodal, interactive, and intelligent digital agents, resulting in the emergence of new models of digital agent systems and human agent integration in a variety of business scenarios, which has brought new challenges to the design and management of business intelligence systems.

The research content includes:

• Research on the design mechanism of multimodal interactive digital agent system based on generative artificial intelligence;
• Design optimization and adjustment of digital agent systems based on human value alignment;
• Research on the ability evolution strategy of digital agent systems based on generative artificial intelligence;
• Research on the multi-agent cooperation and interactive game mechanism of digital agent systems;
• Research on the governance and risk prevention system of digital agent systems.

2. Research on enterprise strategic human capital resources based on generative artificial intelligence

Generative artificial intelligence technology has subverted the traditional logic of knowledge creation. On the one hand, it has reduced the cost and threshold of enterprise knowledge production, and on the other hand, it has reshaped the process of value creation of enterprise human capital resources, which has had a profound impact on the human capital value of knowledge workers and highly skilled talents.

The research contents include:

• Research on the generation mechanism of enterprise strategic human capital resources in the era of artificial intelligence;
• The impact of generative artificial intelligence on enterprise human capital resource investment preferences;
• The value creation process of enterprise strategic human capital resources based on generative artificial intelligence;
• Enterprise human capital resource value assessment and allocation based on generative artificial intelligence;
• Ethical issues and governance of generative artificial intelligence embedded in the value chain of enterprise human capital resources.

3. Research on accounting information generation and disclosure based on generative artificial intelligence

Generative artificial intelligence has subverted the traditional human-centered information generation and processing model, and can significantly improve the processing efficiency and output capacity of large samples and multimodal data, and greatly reduce the threshold requirements for users' professional knowledge and skills. Although generative artificial intelligence has brought more efficient information generation capabilities, it has also exacerbated the generation of false information, biased information, and homogeneous content, and may lead to information overload.

The research contents include:

• The impact of generative artificial intelligence on the content, method and efficiency of enterprise accounting information generation and disclosure;
• The impact of generative artificial intelligence on the collection, processing and dissemination of accounting information by information intermediaries;
•  The impact of generative artificial intelligence on the decision-making process and decision-making effectiveness of accounting information users;
• The impact of generative artificial intelligence on the identification and prevention of potential risks by regulatory and auditing agencies.

4. Research on new product development based on generative artificial intelligence

Generative artificial intelligence has powerful capabilities such as real-world simulation, transfer learning, supercomputing and rational autonomous decision-making. The organic integration of generative artificial intelligence and human intelligence helps to achieve complementary advantages and co-evolution in the process of new product development, and promotes the output of new product development results with higher innovation and more efficiency.

The research contents include:

• The integration mechanism of generative artificial intelligence and human intelligence in the process of new product development;
• Multi-source heterogeneous data fusion of new product development based on generative artificial intelligence;
• The role mechanism of generative artificial intelligence in the concept design stage of new products such as creative acquisition and association;
• New product market verification based on human-intelligence integration;
• Research on iterative optimization mechanisms of new product development based on human-intelligence integration.

5. Research on Multimodal Data Insight and Personalized Marketing Content Generation Based on Generative Artificial Intelligence

Multimodal data insights based on generative artificial intelligence help to fully understand marketing clues, deeply explore marketing knowledge, and guide artificial intelligence to generate personalized content driven by marketing theory, such as text, audio, images, videos, etc., to interact effectively with consumers.

The research content includes:

• Multimodal data insights driven by marketing theory;
• Multimodal data fusion driven by marketing theory;
• Multimodal personalized marketing content generation based on generative artificial intelligence;
• Cross-modal marketing content generation based on generative artificial intelligence;
• Multimodal marketing strategy optimization based on generative artificial intelligence.

Funding Amount and Period:
The NSFC plans to fund about 5 projects, with a funding amount of 2,000,000 RMB per project. The funding period is 4 years, from January 1, 2025 - December 31, 2028.

Eligibility:

• Applicants must be a senior professional title holder and have the experience of conducting basic research projects. Postdoctoral researchers, graduate students who still pursuing degrees and the personnel without host institution are not allowed to apply;
• This project will not count toward the total number of applications at the time of submission, but it will be included from the official receipt until the funding decision by the Natural Science Foundation of China and after funding is granted;
• The applicant can only apply for ONE special program in the same year;
• The applicant and major participants (主要参与者) can only participate in ONE project that belongs to this special program.

Please refer to the 2024 NSFC Official Program Guide for more details.

Application:

• Applicants should submit the application via the online system.
• Select "专项项目" (Special Program) for the category of projects to be funded in the application form, select “研究项目"(Research Projects) for the description of subcategories, and fill in "科学部综合研究项目" (Comprehensive Research Projects of the Ministry of Science) for the description of notes. For all project application code 1, select an application code under G02. Applications with inaccurate or unselected choices will NOT be accepted.
• Applicants should write their applications in accordance with the outline for special project applications. Please indicate at the beginning of the application "2024 Special Project- Research on Scientific Issues of Business Administration in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence: *** (Fill in one of the above five proposed funding areas directions)". The application should highlight limited goals and key breakthroughs, and clearly state the contribution to achieving the overall scientific goals of this special project and solving core scientific problems.
• If the applicant has undertaken other scientific and technology projects related to this special program, he/she should explain the differences and connections between the proposed project and other related projects in the "Research Basis and Working Conditions" section of the application.
• The total number of host institutions and cooperative research institutions for each project shall not exceed 3. The major participants (主要参与者) must be the actual contributors to the project.

Important Dates: