Social Media for Innovation Workshop at Innovation in Action 2011

“The human need to connect and the human need to share”. That’s two reasons why social media is so popular according to Johan Gentzell from Microsoft.

The Social Media for Innovation seminar was also the most popular among the participants on Innovation in Action. It’s also speaks the language on a new era where social media becomes an even more important part of marketing, sales and product development. “In the future we will call us the social media DJ’s, instigators, and focus moderators instead of directors", said Albert Bengtsson from Logica.

Speaking about consumer trends, Albert Bengtsson dived into the way the consumer bridges social media to identify “offline” locations, including restaurant and product recommendations and other purchasing related information. These are all indicator that power is shifting more and more towards the consumer and how much more important word of mouth will be in the future and how the web will increase in importance.

Participants from IKEA, inspired the rest of us by sharing their experience in launching a social media and crowd sourcing webpage called IKEA hackers. The web page encourages the consumers to share inspiration on how the use IKEA furniture in a creative way by telling: “if you have an IKEA hack, we would love to see it”.

Johan from Microsoft mentioned the top three sources of innovation in the corporation: it turned out to be, in order of importance, employees, business partners – and customers, beating both from consultants, internal R&D and academia. This highlighted the importance of harnessing the innovative power of one’s employees, something that many companies could learn from.

IKEA has an internal community that enables 150 managers to share their ideas and questions. “We also see potential value in creating an internal social media for all the employees, but it’s all about creating solutions that give higher value to the organization and in a more cost effective way”, said Eva-Carin Banka Johansson and Mikael Ydholm from IKEA.

An interesting discussion we had in my group was about social media and the privacy. I found a difference in the way we look at our social media presences. The “elder” generation was more reluctant to act with their personal profiles in a private only context, but the younger generation, has lesser problems with mixing their private and professional life on social media.

“While using social media as an innovation tool you increase the importance of trust and relationship building”, said Mikael Lindholm from SECO Tools.

Article by Lisa Renander, Co-founder & CEO, Go Enterprise AB