Using Social Media in Open Innovation: Opportunities and Challenges

Open innovation is relatively a new category in organizations. Organizations are encouraged to share their R&D infrastructure in open innovation approach and attach other's R&D and innovation to their own value chain through creating technical platforms or joint ventures. Social media is one of the tools of communication in the current business world. Social media creates a platform for cooperating and encouraging people for social activities. Considering the expanded role of social media in encouraging participation and gaining external knowledge in an organization, research is missing in this relationship. Papers dealing with social media and open innovation are really limited. So, in the current research, we study the results of using social media in open innovation. As there are limited researches, it is difficult to base a research project on available studies. So we study this area by deductive approach, Delphi method. In order to do so, we collected ideas of 12 experts from fintech industry and prioritized and analyzed them with the Delphi method and finally reached to 16 opportunities and 21 challenges. From experts' point of view, the most important opportunities are increasing the number and quality of received ideas. The most important challenges are creating new methods for receiving ideas to decrease unrelated content and information validation, and legislation. Finally we categorized the opportunities and challenges and presented them as a framework and model.