ABSTRACT
Innovation is a survival tool for the corporate world to play in the ever competitive free global market in the 21st century. The innovation process, especially at the front end, is the most challenging phase because of the inextricably intertwined fuzziness of high uncertainty and the deficiency of information available. Although the uncertainty is irremovable, the input of the information can be improved by motivating people to generate more ideas. In this regard, social media presents unprecedented opportunities for a company to internally improve information processing at the front end of innovation. However, unlike legacy software systems which are built to last, harnessing the power of social media requires committed effort since social media is built to change. This dissertation focuses on the governance and architecture necessary to go beyond the pilot project state. Drawn from two large, multinational companies’ social media platform systems, the findings show that the implementation of successful, sustainable enterprise social media platforms recognizes emerging socio-psychological layers comprised of social capital formation, organic arrangement, vernacular collaboration protocol, and elastic governance. This research provides a framework for enterprise social media in support of innovation and offers practical recommendations for users, designers, managers, executives, enterprises, and prospective adopters.
CHAPTER 1:
INTRODUCTION
The current business environment of global market diversification, trade liberalization, and rapid technological improvement poses new challenges. Innovation is a survival tool that enterprises must use if they are to play the game of business in the competitive free global market.[1] Industry players do not play the game lightheartedly. Instead, they play hard and in doing so push the boundaries of the marketplace. GE and 3M, for instance, provide their employees with funding assistance and even allow them to work on their own projects—projects that often have potential market value—on regular office time. Toward the end of each calendar year, approximately one-third of these knowledge workers are promoted, one-third remain in their current jobs, while one-third must engage in a formal self-evaluation. Everybody feels the rumble. Everybody is affected by the game.
The penalty for failing keep up with the innovation revolution is certain death. Kodak, for example, once a multinational imaging and photographic equipment giant, is facing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Why? Primarily, it ignored the potential of digital-imaging innovation because company decision makers thought that low-resolution digital imaging and the camera equipment that came with it were just toys. In a similar vein, RealPlayer was once well known for its real-time audio and video decoding innovation. In fact, it was the first to bring a portable MP3 player to market. However, RealPlayer’s decision makers ignored the innovation and development work going on in the digital portable music player market because RealPlayer’s decision makers thought low-quality digital music streams wouldn’t go very far.
The innovation process, especially at the front end, is the most challenging phase because of the inextricably intertwined fuzziness of high uncertainty, little information, and influence. Closely examined, although such uncertainty cannot be done away with, we can improve the input of the information. In addition, much information necessary to the innovation process is generated by individuals, the employees within the company. That is, to improve the input of the information at the front end of the innovation is to get—to motivate—people to generate more ideas. In this regard, companies need a tool designed to elicit ideas from their people and connect them to the decision makers in the companies’ information loops. Here, information technology would be of service and social media in particular would be a practical conveyance.
The utilitarian power of social media is manifested in a variety of ways related to scope and scale, ranging from reconnecting with long-lost friends and family, to working on a 6th-grade group homework project, to collaborating with business partners located in different continents, and to facilitating a social movement in the Arab Spring on the streets of Tunisia. In this regard, social media offers a platform for communicating and collaborating in a group context, even changing the world. Social media definitely has social impact. Putting global market competitiveness together with the power of social media, leads to the realization that social media could also have an impact on business by benefiting organizational innovation.
Enriched by Web 2.0 technologies, social media provides exceptional user experiences. Social media gives birth to crowd sourcing, which derives from and is harnessed for the communicative and collaborative power that is drastically changing consumer dynamics as the speed at which users are joining related platforms. Likewise, social media can be used to break down knowledge silos and direct employees’ intelligence and creativity into a company’s innovation and information loop. In terms of the enterprise, social media’s potential as an internal innovation remains a largely untapped business opportunity mainly because of a lack of practical implementation frameworks and guidelines.
Social media presents an unprecedented opportunity[2] for a company to improve internal information processing at the front end of innovation. However, the social media itself may be considered too unconventional for corporate use, as social media is philosophically different from the legacy systems:[3] democratizing knowledge and liberalizing user-generated information (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). That is, while the legacy systems are built to last for providing essential business services under corporate controls, social media software is built to change. Therefore, a different approach is needed to implement social media platforms for corporate use.
There is a report of a very successful case using an IT system to support the innovation process in research and development (R&D) units at Wella AG, a beauty products company, which was taken over by Proctor and Gamble in 2003 (Boeddrich, 2004). After deploying the computer-aided idea management system, which was built upon IBM Lotus Notes, Wella AG was able to (1) dramatically boost its stock share value, (2) motivate workers to develop new ideas and capture all of the ideas, (3) make the idea management process more transparent, and (4) reduce IP conflicts. In this regard, the software system proved useful for supporting activities in the FFE phase in the innovation process.
Another successful story is Boeing-Rocketdyne’s radical innovation without collocation (Malhotra, Majchrzak, Carman, & Lott, 2001). Boeing-Rocketdyne, the major liquidfueled rocket engine manufacturer in the United States, initiated the project team “SLICE” (Simple Low-cost Innovative Concepts Engine), and deployed computermediated collaborative technology. The company was able to co-develop the products with co-located and non co-located team members seamlessly. As a result, BoeingRocketdyne developed the radically innovative rocket-engine, which was able to reduce the cost of a rocket engine by 10,000%. Also, Boeing-Rocketdyne was able to commercialize the rocket engine 1,000% faster than conventional ones.
However, using a social media platform for IT-based projects is not sufficient for achieving implementation and deployment. Implementing social media platforms requires a committed effort. Without a proper business goal, efforts to continually push innovation—including adopting an IT-based social media platform—are likely to yield sub-optimal results. The next section presents a descriptive case study that shows the importance of commitment and focus to the success of efforts to establish a corporate social media platform.
1.1 SUSTAINABLE IMPLEMENTATION
GlobalPharma is a successful multinational pharmaceutical giant, with tens of billions in revenue, and hundreds of billions in total assets. Company activities include research and development, manufacturing, and sales. GlobalPharma Corporation has been in existence for several decades and during that time has consistently innovated in pharmaceuticalrelated products and processes. The IT division of GlobalPharma embarked on a worldwide internal campaign to encourage IT employees in all its subsidiaries to offer their ideas for new products and businesses using a new innovative social media tool. The CreativeWave was an in-house social software application designed to get employees to participate in an innovation program at GlobalPharma. The initial target audience was IT employees. The CreativeWave vision was to eventually use the platform as a service for the entire organization. To fulfill this goal, employees were encouraged to submit their ideas to specific challenges and vote on other ideas that were submitted. The most feasible and innovative were rewarded with funding in order to complete their awardwinning projects.
The initiative was designed to be launched in multiple phases. In the first phase, the concentration was on development and delivery of the social networking platform and it primarily focused on the IT department and its employees. At the beginning, employees participated in droves as they were excited by the idea of social media and the possibility of having their ideas recognized. However, by the three month mark, the initial effort had lost momentum. According to the senior sponsor of the project, “Our first launch provided insights on how people used the tool and how they expected to be engaged. We wanted to get a large number of people using the platform across the corporation to increase our understanding.” In the first year, over 15 communities were set up on the CreativeWave platform. All had successful initial launches but could not sustain the momentum.
In analyzing the first phase the team realized that the CreativeWave was not marketed in a consistent way; therefore, people tended to forget that it was still up and running. It needed to be constantly pushed to become firmly established in people’s routines. In addition, the effort required to support and run an innovation challenge was significant and without a consistent process, responses to idea submissions were delayed.
In the second major launch, more supporting communication and engagement was provided. In addition, instead of hosting multiple innovation challenges per year, the team decided to host only 1-2 per year, minimizing the support effort. To ensure consistency in evaluation, a formal process was developed to evaluate the ideas and even train ideators on how to expand their ideas. The latter helped to improve quality of the ideas. Finally, the team focused on recognizing participants regardless of whether their idea was selected or not.
The second launch of CreativeWave received 91 ideas of which six were selected for further investment. And, presently the IT department is getting additional inquiries from other departments to use the platform. An important lesson learned from this effort, according to the sponsor, is that “the social networking tool itself is not the answer nor is just having a “dropbox” process for people to submit ideas. You also need to have a comprehensive innovation process in place that leverages the social networking platform as a facilitator for part of the process. And, as with any other major project/program you must have the appropriate communications and engagement strategy to keep the momentum and awareness high.”
Perhaps, the main problem in this implementation equation was the design. First, such a platform should be aligned with the company’s objectives and business goals. In this particular case, it became evident that the designers did not have a concrete roadmap, business case, or use case. The tool was just treated as an IT-project piloted by the IT department. In addition, there were no marketing plans pushing adoption and participation. Nor was there any effort to encourage participation by incorporating the tool into everyday work life. Overall, the first phase introduction of the CreativeWave was not well integrated in to the employees’ work structure. Therefore, the employees came to think of participating in the CreativeWave as “extra” work, not work assigned to them and not work to which they were fully committed. As a consequence, the tool became a low priority, and so it foundered. These early learning helped correct some initial problems, and the second launch of CreativeWave was much more successful.
1.2 DISSERTATION ORGANIZATION
As illustrated in the previous section, for a social media platform to thrive, a concerted effort is required in terms of implementation and deployment. It is not enough to treat such a platform as an IT-based project. Hence, this dissertation explores how enterprises can domesticate and accommodate social media platforms to support the generation of ideas internally, brainstorming, and concept development at the front end of the innovation process. More importantly, this research focuses on the governance and architecture necessary to go beyond the pilot project state. The case studies offered in this research are drawn from existing, sustainable, ongoing social media platform systems. The research itself focused on crafting a practical framework and recommendations for enterprises.
This dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 2 provides a discussion of the relevant literature about innovations in organizational contexts, the complexity of the innovation process, and techno-informational links between innovation and social media, as well as a comprehensive review of theories and how they guide the present research. Chapter 3 presents a holistic view of the research design, comprising research objectives and questions, interpretive epistemology, and research methods and instruments. In particular, the methods and instruments section incorporates the data collection components, the research framework, and the data analysis process, procedures, and techniques. Chapter 4 offers a background and brief history of two case study companies that have successfully implemented sustainable social media for internal innovation. Chapters 5 and 6 show the findings compiled according to the research objectives and research questions. Chapter 7 discusses the research findings and their implications for theory and practice. Chapter 8 restates the research findings, the contributions of the research, its practical implications, an agenda for further research, directions in social computing research, together with concluding remarks.
[1] Innovation is one of the critical strategies providing the enterprise a means to secure and enhance market share (Hemmatfar, Salehi, & Bayat, 2010) and to thrive in sustainable competitive advantage (Drucker, 2006; Hitt, Ireland, Camp, & Sexton, 2001; Kuratko, Ireland, Covin, & Hornsby, 2005). Thus, the ability to innovate is considered a fundamental and essential component of competitive edge embedded within an enterprise’s structures, processes, products, and services (Gunday, Ulusoy, Kilic, & Alpkan, 2009; Lefebvre & Lefebvre, 1993; Ritter & Gemunden, 2004)
[2] Recently, social software has phenomenally been a hot topic in social computing. Psychologically, some social software applications, such as blogs (Kawaura, Yamashita, & Kawakami, 1999; Miura & Yamashita, 2007), satisfy its users because it responds to an individual’s social and psychological needs (Alm, 2006). It, to demonstrate, liberalizes individuals to freely express, produce, and consume information over social media (Fuchs, 2010). Moreover, it is believed that social software is capable of stimulating, facilitating, or nurturing ideation in the FFE phase, which are the most critical and challenging phase in innovation process due to its characteristics and complexity, especially the ideation. Therefore, social media is expected to harness the complexity in the FFE phase, capture ideas generated, support information processing, make such information and ideas searchable, and transform them into organizational knowledge repository.
[3] However, relaxing control which results in the liberalization of information could pose uncomfortable factors to the managements in several managerial and security threats to the enterprise such as synchronicity, privacy, security, connectivity, work-life issue, non-systematic controls, information overload, and arbitrary filtering of communication.
HARNESSING SOCIAL MEDIA COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE TO CHAMPION ENTERPRISE INNOVATION