Abstract

Integrating social media into the innovation process can open up the potential for organizations to utilize the collective creativity of consumers from all over the world. The research in this paper sets out to identify how social media can facilitate innovation. By taking a design science approach this research has come up with a new method for matching innovation tasks with social media characteristics. This supports the selection of best suitable social media and can help organizations to achieve their innovation goals. At the core of the method is a honeycomb model which describes seven social media characteristics on three dimensions: audience, content and time. The method has been evaluated by using an approach called scenario walkthrough that is applied in a real-life spatial planning project. This research concludes that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question how social media can be of value for the innovation process. However, organizations that want to know how it can benefit their own innovation process can use the Social Media Innovation Method presented in this research as a way to provide an answer to that question, uniquely tailored to each innovation task for which social media is to be used.

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