Social media representations of innovation by non-users: everyday problem solving

Abstract

This exploratory study extends the conceptual space of open innovation. We build on previous work recognising opportunities to contribute to a firm's innovation processes, particularly ideation, from the external environment. Initially, scholarship focused on users’ intimate knowledge of a firm’s products and services such as suppliers and lead users. More recently, affordances of digital technologies have broadened the scope of contributors to include, for example, crowdsourcing. We go a step further and consider the often-overlooked group ‘non-users’. Specifically, employing a novel two-stage approach incorporating network visualization based on 7607 Instagram #innovation posts supplemented by qualitative analysis, we explore the contribution non-users might make to firms’ innovation activities. Findings suggest that nonusers conceptualise innovation as problem solving but represent it through ludic and utopic narratives. The value of non-users in the innovation process is not in addressing specific technical problems but in offering a new lens through which to appreciate the phenomenon of innovation itself.