Facilitating Innovations and Value Co-Creation in Industrial B2B Firms by Combining Digital Marketing, Social Media and Crowdsourcing

The tightened competition in global markets demands that firms continuously develop new products and service innovations. In recent years crowdsourcing has increased in popularity as a method of gathering new ideas outside the organization for product and service development. This means that firms can apply the wisdom of the crowd for certain tasks and challenges instead of only relying on the know-how of their employees or a few experts. However, to make crowdsourcing work, there is a basic requirement to make external parties aware of the challenges or problems that need to be solved. Various digital marketing communications tools and social media platforms seems to provide new channels to enable this interaction. The purpose of this paper is to examine how industrial business-to-business (B2B) firms could interact with their products’ end-users via social media in order to receive new ideas, feedback and solutions to improve their innovation process. We propose a framework to assess how social media and crowdsourcing can be integrated in an industrial B2B context. The results of this paper reveal significant practical challenges to overcome before social media can be effectively utilized in the industrial B2B sector as a fully functioning crowdsourcing enabler.