The role of social media data for research on user-driven innovation

This chapter focuses on social media in service innovation research. Specifically, the chapter presents the use of blogs as a particular type of social media as a means for collecting ideas in open innovation processes for service innovation in engaged research (Van de Ven, 2007). The specific service sector in which the method is applied is the research library sector. The results of the study show that, from a practical point of view, blogs can contribute to generating service innovation ideas from the users, that are useful to organizations. From a research point of view the study confirms that social media such as blogs can indeed be useful in service innovation research processes. However the method presents also a number of limitations, mostly regarding expectations as to the number of posted ideas, the layout of the blogs and reaching out to potential users.