Social media in networked innovation between b-to-b companies

In today's networked business environment, companies need to include their employees, customers and other external parties in innovation in a more structured and consistent manner. Recently, social media utilization in companies is a topic that has attracted a lot of interest in academia and business. Nevertheless the existing research is rather limited, focusing mainly on the business to consumer domain. The intention of this paper is to extend our understanding of what are the current barriers preventing companies from utilising more social media for innovation with external partners. We also need to understand how companies have already utilised social media and what tools they are using. To understand the implementation of social media, we need to understand its three levels: social media utilisation inside the company, with partners and with customers. The data consists of interviews with seven companies conducted during the autumn of 2014 to the spring of 2015. The level of current utilisation of social media was fairly low among the companies interviewed, and the main barriers were divided into three categories: Customer-related, practice-related and knowledge-related processes.