Abstract:

Contemporary organizations should be aware that current users of social media have the potential to create and develop new innovative solutions, constituting a valuable tool for competing in the market environment. Information posted on social media is a unique source of innovation sourced from customers. Their use can take place at any stage of the innovation process. Enterprises can create crowdsourcing platforms to collect ideas at the stage of creating innovations, or improving products at the stage of innovation development, as well as test virtual products at the stage of launch. Getting ideas from social media users is not a simple task, however. Companies must create the conditions and incentives that will encourage users to co-create innovation, as well as take into account the risks associated with it. The specificity of social media is based on high interactivity and quick evaluation, which makes it difficult for companies to control the actions taken by users (Peters, Chen, Kaplan, Ognibeni, Pauwels 2013). This requires constant monitoring of the actions taken by social media users, especially in the innovation process. The key task of modern organizations is to encourage and monitor the actions of social media users to create innovation. The aim of the article is therefore to describe social media and the actions taken by clients in order to co-create innovation in enterprises. For this purpose, the Internet survey method was used. 356 social media users participated in the study. Research results show that customers accept the trend of co-creating innovation using social media. Few of the respondents, however, contribute to the creation of a new product / service offer using dedicated crowdsourcing websites. This suggests that enterprises should make better use of customers' potential in social media and encourage them to become more involved in the process of co-innovation.