Social media and innovation: A systematic literature review and future research directions

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Highlights

  • Little is known on social media-innovation interactions, in practice and theory.

  • Social media is seen as enabler and driver of innovation in extant literature.

  • Most empirical studies have adopted behavioural or resource-based perspective.

  • Multi-level, multi-faceted insights could advance knowledge in the discourse.

  • Theoretical, contextual and methodological research diversity is needed.

Abstract

Social media are privileged vehicles to generate rich data created with unprecedented multi-faceted insights to drive faster ideation and commercialisation of client-centric innovations. The essence of data generated through social media is rooted in the connections and relationships it enables between firms and their stakeholders, and represents one of the greatest assets for data-driven innovation. As most of the firms are still experiencing and trailblazing in this matter, the current challenge is therefore to learn how to benefit from social media's potential for innovation purposes. In the last decade, research interest has increased towards understanding social media – innovation interactions. The reliance on the wisdom of the crowd in driving major business decisions and shaping society's way of life is now well acknowledged in academic and business literature. Social media is increasingly used as a tool to manage knowledge flows within and across organisation boundaries in the process of innovation. Yet, conceptualisation of social media and innovation interaction and a systematic review of how far the field has come remains providential. Therefore, through a systematic literature review we aim to identify research trends and gaps in the field, conceptualise current paradigmatic views and therein provide clear propositions to guide future research. Based on a systematic review, 111 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and found in EBSCO Host® and Scopus® databases are descriptively analysed, with results synthesized across current research trends. Findings suggest social media is seen as enabler and driver of innovation, with behavioural and resource based perspectives being the most popular theoretical lens used by researchers. The originality of the paper is rooted in the comprehensive search and systematic review of studies in the discourse, which have not been unified to date. Implications for advancement of knowledge are embedded in the purposefully proposed theoretical, contextual and methodological perspectives, providing future research directions for exploring social media capability in innovation management.

Introduction

Social media are ubiquitous in individuals' lives and, increasingly in companies. Companies are striving to become or remain innovative in increasingly complex multi-actor and multi-stakeholder environments (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010), while developing new approaches and tools to connect with many aspects of the innovation ecosystem (Jha and Bose, 2016). New business models promote that firms should generate, develop and integrate knowledge in the process of innovation by engaging internal departments and external ecosystems (Chesbrough, 2003, Chesbrough, 2006; Ritala and Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, 2013). Knowledge has been advanced as the source of competitive advantage in today's world (Solima et al., 2016), often dispersed (Chen et al., 2018), yet increasing closer in distance with the advent of new forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as social media (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010)., In such a context of collaboration and interaction with their external environment, the challenge for companies is then to learn of the affordances of social media in organisation settings (Palacios-Marqués et al., 2015; Treem and Leonardi, 2012) and its interactions with the innovation process (Papa et al., 2018; Roberts et al., 2016). Accordingly, scholarly attention has been drawn towards understanding the role of social media in creating and managing knowledge flows within the organisation (Brzozowski, 2009; Inkinen et al., 2015; Scuotto et al., 2017a) and across organisational boundaries (Adams, 2014; Callaghan, 2016; Filieri, 2013; Hitchen et al., 2017). In the process of achieving competitive advantage (Del Giudice and Della Peruta, 2016; Pérez-González et al., 2017), social media has been used by firms for marketing (Cooke and Buckley, 2008), engaging customer in product or service discussions (Woffington, 2006) and co-development of products (Cheng and Krumwiede, 2018; Pohjola and Puusa, 2016). The increasing involvement of stakeholders in the firm's innovation processes coupled with increasing cost, speed and processing efficiency of ICTs has further encouraged firms to invest in social media tools (Mangold and Faulds, 2009; Scuotto et al., 2017c).

Social media, in fostering communication and connecting people and companies represent ‘a vehicle for developing customer insights, accessing knowledge, co-creating ideas and concepts with users, and supporting new product launches’ (Roberts et al., 2016, p. 41). Social media has been used by firms for socialisation, knowledge transfer and managerial power enactment (see Treem and Leonardi, 2012). For instance, Starbucks online platform called ‘My Starbucks Idea’ affords customers to provide feedback on current offerings and submit new ideas for product or service development (Gallaugher and Ransbotham, 2010). Likewise, Procter & Gamble's Connect + Develop programme has been well known for affording the firm with the ability to generate ideas from people all across the globe via innovation challenges. Increasingly, firms are experimenting new ways to leverage the widely distributed knowledge sources to improve innovation performance (Scuotto et al., 2017a). The case of the Finnish company Nokia's creation of WP7 mobile phone is arguably the most public exemplar of how firms can leverage social media in the fuzzy front end of innovation processes to generate and develop ideas through information sharing. Through social media tools, Nokia engaged its customers in real-time global co-creation process, tapping into the knowledge and feelings of its community of users.

Social media and innovation are closely intertwined (Brandtzaeg and Følstad, 2016). Business leaders have long claimed that firms need to embrace social media and provide their consumers an environment where they can socially interact, participate in firm activities, communicate and be entertained (Bercovici, 2010). Business press has accordingly been proliferated with comments on interactions of social media and innovation in competitive strategy (see Baker and Green, 2008; DuBois, 2010). Social media is shaping organisational activities (Treem and Leonardi, 2012) and increasingly those related to innovation management. Use cases in academic literature include social media for knowledge sharing, ideation, feedback loops and increasingly open innovation (see Brandtzaeg et al., 2016; Mainsah et al., 2016; Valentine et al., 2016). The fourth wave of global annual survey by McKinsey conducted after the global financial crisis revealed that 65% of firms integrated Web 2.0 technologies in their processes and those that did so intensively gained greater market share and margins (Bughin and Chui, 2010). A more recent Global Innovation Survey by BCG (2018) reported 79% of strong innovating firms integrating digitised innovation processes, bringing new ideas from external sources through use of social media, fostering an open and collaborative environment. Public sector organisations are also optimising social media for innovation endeavours. For instance, social media are used to drive social innovations through public engagement in civic projects (Eom et al., 2018; Mergel, 2016; Zheng and Zheng, 2014) and to enable reuse of socially-constructed data for policy making (Gil-Garcia et al., 2014), to name few of the novel and emerging interactions of social media and innovation in public sector.

The need to innovate is a necessary condition in a competitive market, especially where the strategic knowledge management focus is increasingly customer-centric (Archer-Brown and Kietzmann, 2018). More recent trends in publications are alluding to the moderating role of social media capability in driving innovation through new sets of value perceptions and collaboration intentions (Carlson et al., 2018) and in enabling the exploratory-exploitative activities of internal and external knowledge transfer for innovation (Benitez et al., 2018; Garcia-Morales et al., 2018). Common to the interactions described above is the dual role of social media of 1) driving the front end of innovation process by leveraging the ability to foster socialisation through increased visibility (Treem and Leonardi, 2012) and, 2) enabling the development of existing tacit knowledge into new forms of tacit knowledge through capability building (Nguyen et al., 2015; Parinsi and Ratumbuisang, 2017). Thus, this conceptualisation is important to systematically explore and explain the social media and innovation interactions. Yet, this intrinsic relationship has not been theorised in extant literature (Jalonen, 2015; Lin et al., 2017).

Accordingly, the aim of this systematic literature review is three fold. First, we identify the general observed trends in the rapidly growing research on social media and innovation. We limit the focus based on an inclusion-exclusion criteria. Second, we situate the social media and innovation interaction in the theoretical conceptualisation of social media as driver and enabler of innovation. In doing so, we structure the manuscript in such a way that provides readers (researchers and practitioners) with a clear information on current social media paradigms. This consequently supports our third objective of identifying research gaps and providing clear research propositions for future directions. Inspired by recent systematic literature reviews (see Iden et al., 2017; Lu et al., 2018), this systematic literature review thus offers new ways to synthesise literature, report current practices and develop propositions to guide future research in the discourse. Specifically, the originality of this systematic literature review lies in its analytical focus on social media paradigms. Adopting from Guba (1990) we take the view of ‘paradigm’ as peculiar set of beliefs that support and guide behaviour in the discourse.

Overall, this paper makes three contributions. First, it links the broader knowledge transfer debate of social media and innovation through the concept of affordances, and hence enriches the current conversations in the academic discourse. Second, it provides a structured evaluation of theoretical and methodological perspectives in research examining social media and innovation interactions adapting from previous scholarly work on developing systematic literature reviews. Finally, it provides clear propositions and future research directions, capturing the current state of research in the field and drawing attention to potential research opportunities for future.

Section snippets

Method

A systematic literature review summarises existing evidence, identifying gaps and directions for future research (Petticrew and Roberts, 2006), hence identifying current boundaries in the discourse. It differs from a narrative review because of its methodical approach, implying a detailed description of the steps taken to select, scan and analyse the literature, aiming at reducing biases and increasing transparency (Fink, 2013; Tranfield et al., 2003). It amplifies opportunities for replication

Findings and discussion

In this section, descriptive statistics are presented and then each research question has been addressed. Where appropriate, reference numbers of papers are provided, as listed in Appendix 1.

Future research directions

Propositions for research based on above findings, including promising areas for theoretical contributions, which could advance the knowledge in the discourse, are provided in this section. Directions for future research capture the shortcomings found in the systematic meta-analysis by highlighting under explored aspects of social media in innovation management. Particularly, the section addresses the final research question - What are the promising avenues for the future development of

Concluding discussions

This systematic literature review paper has provided an overview of the current trends of social media paradigms in innovation and its management. The analysis showed that large numbers of articles on social media-innovation are a-theoretical, with qualitative methods being the preferred methodological approach. This paper has identified most popular theories, units of analysis, sample regions, types of social media and stages of innovation investigated. In addition to this, it reveals the most

Acknowledgements

Not applicable.

Declaration of interest

None to be declared.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Hardik Bhimani is a researcher, particularly examining the interaction between human psychology and innovation, which considering where you are reading this, makes perfect sense. He is best known for developing The Open Innovation Game, a laboratory instrument to test and re-test the human-side of innovation. This feat has won him the ‘Best PhD project’ from the international R&D Management community and allowed him to showcase his work at prestigious innovation management and strategy events.

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  • Cited by (0)

    Hardik Bhimani is a researcher, particularly examining the interaction between human psychology and innovation, which considering where you are reading this, makes perfect sense. He is best known for developing The Open Innovation Game, a laboratory instrument to test and re-test the human-side of innovation. This feat has won him the ‘Best PhD project’ from the international R&D Management community and allowed him to showcase his work at prestigious innovation management and strategy events. A student for life, Hardik has so far achieved academic qualifications in information technology, psychology and applied finance, with a PhD in management (behavioural innovation) underway. Hardik also believes in sharing knowledge and his pragmatic approach to teaching has won him multiple ‘Good Teaching’ awards at RMIT University. On a personal note, he claims to do his best work between midnight and dawn at home in his Melbourne garden. Besides, he loves the sight of rolling countryside hills, the smell of rain on mud, and is a self-proclaimed poet. You can get to his tweets and LinkedIn stories by clicking the links below (connection requests are welcome and sincerely appreciated).

    Anne-Laure Mention is the Director of the Global Business Innovation Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. She is also a Professor at the School of Management at RMIT, Melbourne; a visiting professor at Université de Liège, Belgium and the Deputy Head of the Centre d'Evaluation de la Performance des Entreprises and a visiting professor at Tampere University of Technology, Finland. She holds several other visiting positions in Europe and Asia. Anne-Laure is one of the founding editors of the Journal of Innovation Management, and the Deputy Head of the ISPIM Advisory Board. She is the co-editor of a book series on Open Innovation, published by World Scientific/Imperial College Press. Her research interests revolve around open and collaborative innovation, innovation in business to business services, with a particular focus on financial industry and fintech, technology management, and business venturing. She has been awarded twice the prestigious IBM Faculty Award for her research on innovation.

    Pierre-Jean Barlatier, PhD, Habil. is a researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg). His research focuses on Strategic Management and Organisation Theory, with particular interest on strategic innovation management, organisational ambidexterity and new organisational forms. Pierre-Jean is also an associate researcher at BETA-University of Strasbourg (France) and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Technology Sydney (Australia) and a Marie Curie Fellow at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). He has been recently guest editor for the French journal Revue Française de Gestion and currently serves on the scientific panel of ISPIM.

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