Aligning Capabilities and Social Media Affordances for Open Innovation in Governments

Abstract

In recent years the proliferation of a new technological evolution has aroused great interest from science and practice: social media. Subsuming different types of online applications where users can create, edit and share content, social media enables new forms of interaction with others. Organisations already recognise its relevance and start leveraging on it. Furthermore, organisations identify the role of service innovation as one major driver for economic growth and competitive advantage. Nevertheless, although social media affords organisations to interact with their customers, the potential for utilising it for improving their service innovation activities is almost unexploited yet. Therefore, this paper aims at providing a framework for supporting the use of social media affordances for service innovation. Its applicability is tested in the domain "government". Based on theoretical constructs a conceptual analysis is presented, tested in a specific domain and supplemented by potential future research and implications for theory and practice.

An investigation of how the Australian brewing industry influence consumers on Twitter

“…Social media is said to be fundamentally changing the way we communicate, collaborate, consume and create content (Aral, Dellarocas, & Godes, 2013;As-Saber et al, 2014;Malsbender, Hoffmann, & Becker, 2014). Because of its dynamic nature and the potential of on-going consumer-to-consumer communication, it is vitally important for businesses to understand how to use it in order to reach and influence customers (Augar & Zeleznikow, 2014;Mangold & Faulds, 2009).…”

Social Media Affordances and Information Sharing: An Evidence from Chinese Public Organizations

“…Social media affordance deals with those hidden possibilities that establish a link between the user and social media (Cabiddu, 2014). Prior research shows that scholars used affordance theory to define the role of social media in organizational practices, which includes knowledge sharing (Gibbs, Rozaidi, & Eisenberg, 2013;Majchrzak, 2013), knowledge creation (Mansour, 2013;Wagner, 2014), external communication (Argyris, 2015), intellectual capital production (Kane, 2011), election campaigns (Dyrby, 2012), activism (Obar, 2014), customer engagement (Cabiddu et al, 2014), and government openness (Malsbender, 2013;Stamati, 2015).…”

“…Several researchers investigated social media affordance in the public sector (Din, Øystein, & Wahid, 2017;Kreiss, Lawrence, & McGregor, 2017;Malsbender, 2013;Chen, 2016;Stamati, 2015;Vaast & Kaganer, 2013;Zheng, 2013). Majchrzak et al (2013) argued that social media encourage knowledge sharing and conversation in the organization by four different affordances: meta-voicing, triggered attention, network-informed associating, and generative role-taking.…”

“…Argyris and Monu, (2015) research showed the combination of affordance theory and public relations theory, and argued that eight actions of social media afford potentials for external communication including connectivity, self-expression, engagement, monitorability, reach, recordability, and availability. Malsbender et al's (2013) study was based on public organizations and identified six affordances visibility, persistence, editability, association, metavoicing, and generativity (see Table1) for external regulatory interactions; the author proposed these social media affordances for interaction with customers and citizens aiming at the development of service innovation. Four fundamental affordances mentioned by Treem and Leonardi (2012) to discuss organizational communication in general, the authors argued that some of these affordances could influence many processes in an organization, and the author explained that visibility, persistence, editability, and association assist in characterizing what is new and, quite possibly, consequential about social media for organizational communication procedures.…”

Working in the Digital Age: Merging a Status Quo Bias Perspective and Reflective Pratice

“…At the same time, IT use can save time, reduce errors and streamline internal processes. Nevertheless, digital change is accompanied by new roles and modified needs for (IT) competence (e.g., Hill, 2014;Malsbender et al, 2014;Ogonek et al, 2018Ogonek et al, , 2016, as well as a changing attitude towards digital solutions (e.g., Ogonek et al, 2018). This triad has been intensively studied and provides the basis for our investigation.…”