Emergence of Social Media as an Innovation Driver in Business Organisations: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

In the era of globalisation, an organisation's ability to innovate determines to a large extent whether it will survive and stay relevant or become obsolete and redundant. However, despite making innovation an organisational priority by allocating adequate funds, building in-house R&D teams, and getting a buy-in from the top management, companies are not happy with the quality as well as the quantity of the output. Indeed, innovation is not a straightforward process and can turn out to be a frustrating experience for organisations, especially the ones who tend to follow the ‘closed innovation' model. On the other hand, businesses that have embraced the ‘open innovation' model are more likely to succeed in their efforts as they can combine the skills, knowledge, and expertise that they have developed internally with the ideas, insights, and solutions from the external sources. A key role in this regard can be played by social media, which provides a variety of sharing, collaboration, and networking opportunities to the businesses and has its application across the entire innovation funnel. Realizing this, some of the world's most successful companies are showing tremendous skill and foresight in using social media for open innovation. Although social media provides a game-changing opportunity to the businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve, taking advantage of the medium requires more than having a social media presence or a maintaining a community blog. For deriving maximum benefits out of using social media for innovation, organisations need to ensconce it in their culture and use it in combination with other traditional and non-traditional methods. This paper aims to highlight the increasingly important role that social media is playing in the innovation processes of organisations, examine the techniques and methodologies that organisations are adopting to use social media for innovation, and recommend the steps that can be taken by the organisations to obtain maximum value out of the medium.