From Social Media to Social Product Development: The Impact of Social Media on Co-Creation of Innovation

The objective of this paper is to discuss the impact of social media on customer co-creation in the innovation process. Customer cocreation denotes an active, creative and social collaboration process between producers and customers (users), facilitated by a company, in the context of new product or service development. We propose a typology of co-creation activities in order to develop conceptual arguments how social media can impact the relationships among customers involved in co-creation as well as the relationship between customers and the hosting firm. Social media can make economic-exchange relations more collaborative and social, but interestingly may also turn relations formerly based on social-exchange into “money markets” with strong competition among actors. As a result, we develop a set of questions that can lead future research in these regards.