From Responsible AI Governance to Competitive Advantage: Examining the Role of AI Governance Capability in Driving Innovation and Organizational Performance in Nigerian Organizations

Artificial intelligence creates opportunities for organizational innovation while introducing accountability, fairness, privacy, and oversight challenges. Existing research explains AI resources and business value more extensively than the organizational capability required to govern AI responsibly and translate governance into strategic outcomes. This conceptual paper develops a framework connecting AI governance capability, innovation capability, organizational performance, and competitive advantage in Nigerian organizations. A purposive, integrative synthesis of 20 journal articles informs construct differentiation and the development of seven hypotheses. Drawing on resource-based and dynamic capability perspectives, the paper conceptualizes AI governance capability through strategic accountability, data and model lifecycle governance, ethical assurance, human oversight, and adaptive monitoring. Innovation capability is proposed as a mechanism linking governance capability to two distinct organizational ou