Hannu Kärkkäinen

Social media utilization in business-to-business relationships of technology industry firms

Even today, it is a fairly common argument in business-to-business companies, especially in traditional industrial companies, that social media is only useful in the business-to-consumer sector. The perceived challenges, opportunities and social media use cases in business-to-business sector have received little attention in the literature. Therefore, this paper focuses on bridging this gap with a survey of social media use cases, opportunities and challenges in industrial business-to-business companies. The study also examines the essential differences between business-to-consumer and business-to-business in these respects. The paper starts by defining social media and Web 2.0, and then characterizes social media in business, and social media in business-to-business. Finally, we present and analyze the results of our empirical survey of 125 business-to-business companies in the Finnish technology industry sector. This paper suggests that there is a significant gap between the perceived potential of social media and social media use with customers and partners in business-to-business companies, and identifies potentially effective ways to reduce the gap.

Social media use and potential in business-to-business companies' innovation

Social media use, potential and challenges in innovation have received little attention in literature, especially from the standpoint of the business-to-business sector. Therefore, this paper focuses on bridging this gap with a survey of social media use, potential and challenges, combined with a social media - focused innovation literature review of state-of-the-art. The study also studies the essential differences between business-to-consumer and business-to-business in the above respects. The paper starts by defining of social media and web 2.0, and then characterizes social media in business, social media in business-to-business sector and social media in business-to-business innovation. Finally we present and analyze the results of our empirical survey of 122 Finnish companies. This paper suggests that there is a significant gap between perceived potential of social media and social media use in innovation activity in business-to-business companies, recognizes potentially effective ways to reduce the gap, and clarifies the found differences between B2Bs and B2Cs.

Benefits of social media in business-to-business customer interface in innovation

The aim of this research is to explore social media and its benefits especially from business-to-business innovation and related customer interface perspective, and to create a more comprehensive picture of the possibilities of social media for the business-to-business sector. Business-to-business context was chosen because it is in many ways a very different environment for social media than business-to-consumer context, and is currently very little academically studied. A systematic literature review on B2B use of social media and achieved benefits in the inn ovation con text was performed to answer the questions above and achieve the research goals. The study clearly demonstrates that not merely B2Cs, as commonly believed, but also B2Bs can benefit from the use of social media in a variety of ways. Concerning the broader classes of innovation --related benefits, the reported benefits of social media use referred to increased customer focus and understanding, increased level of customer service, and decreased time-to-market. The study contributes to the existing social media --related literature, because there were no found earlier comprehensive academic studies on the use of social media in the innovation process in the context of B2B customer interface.

Dependency between learning and profitability in different industry conditions: a system dynamic simulation

Technological change and especially radical changes are a major source of uncertainty for strategic management of technology. We look at this situation through the lens of the resource-based view of the firm (RBV). RBV proposes that the competitiveness of industrial companies depends on their ability to manage portfolios of rare and valuable resources. Learning is an important mechanism in resource development and management. We have developed a system dynamic model to understand the linkage between learning and profitability under different conditions set by the appropriability and transferability of resources. The research problem is to examine how profitable the innovator and imitator are in different industry conditions after a radical innovation has been launched to the market. The setting informs the industrial manager whether it is economically feasible to open up the R&D to external influences in a situation of discontinuous change, given the industry parameters. The results show that the expected...

Conceptualizing Big Social Data

The popularity of social media and computer-mediated communication has resulted in high-volume and highly semantic data about digital social interactions. This constantly accumulating data has been termed as Big Social Data or Social Big Data, and various visions about how to utilize that have been presented. However, as relatively new concepts, there are no solid and commonly agreed definitions of them. We argue that the emerging research field around these concepts would benefit from understanding about the very substance of the concept and the different viewpoints to it. With our review of earlier research, we highlight various perspectives to this multi-disciplinary field and point out conceptual gaps, the diversity of perspectives and lack of consensus in what Big Social Data means. Based on detailed analysis of related work and earlier conceptualizations, we propose a synthesized definition of the term, as well as outline the types of data that Big Social Data covers. With this, we aim to foster future research activities around this intriguing, yet untapped type of Big Data.

Visual Network Analysis of Twitter Data for Co-organizing Conferences: Case CMAD 2013

The aim of this research is to explore what kinds of insights information visualization of social media data can provide for co-organizing conferences. Our paper focuses on Twitter use before, during and after conference. We present a case study based on an conference of Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD 2013). With the process of data-driven visual network analysis, we used Twitter data to analyse the network of conference participants and the conferences discussion topics. We were able to identify e.g. influential conference participants, most interesting presentations and discussions, similarities between interests of the conference participants. Hence, several development and information needs of conference co-organization were derived from the information visualizations, which have implications for improving the planning and co-organizing of conferences, as well as for Twitter use in conference communication.

Supply chain development as a knowledge development task

The study utilises two research streams of knowledge management – knowledge maturity models and strategies of accelerating the knowledge creation in an organisation – to understand and support the adoption of complex practices of Supply Chain Management (SCM). Generic development strategies called bottom-up, top-down and middle-up-down are derived from the theories and evaluated in two case companies representing different industries but the same development area, inventory management. The case study is organised into two parts. First, the development to date is presented in both case companies and the cases are used to identify the basic prerequisites, advantages and disadvantages of the bottom-up and top-down strategies. Second, potential development strategies for the future are analysed. The findings of the case studies suggest that the selection between different strategies is related to the cultural and organisational environments, the complexity caused by the issue itself and by climbing the knowledge maturity stages, and the relative importance of the issue to be developed. As a result the study gives guidelines to development strategy selection, especially focusing to two crucial questions: where do you expect the knowledge to be accumulated and in what form do you expect the knowledge to be stored and communicated.

Contribution of virtual teams to learning and knowledge generation in innovation-related projects

Virtual Teams (VTs), consisting of participants from many geographically distant subunits, or even belonging to many organisations and communicating mainly through ICT, are used for the purpose of sharing development costs and shortening the time to market. The paper analyses how a VT may facilitate or prevent learning, knowledge generation, and ideation processes in New Product/Service Development (NP/SD). First, the definition of VTs as a specific form of organisation is discussed. Then a review of what has been written about this kind of organisation is given, to provide a better understanding of how this organisational form may impact the NP/SD process. Given the fact that few studies have been produced on the topic, the main research areas requiring further investigations are identified. Managerial recommendations are offered as a conclusion.

Utilizing front‐end‐of‐innovation concepts in software development

Purpose – The traditional front‐end‐of‐innovation (FEI) research and requirements engineering (RE) in software development have realized the opportunities for overall innovation process improvements by focusing on improving the front‐end activities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the managerial perceptions on the similarities and differences in the FEI concepts between software industry and the traditional industrial sector.Design/methodology/approach – The research approach of this paper can be categorized as a case study. Causal cognitive maps are used as graphic tools for collecting and analyzing the perceptions of selected experts about the concepts of FEI, and for recognizing the perceived interrelationships between these concepts.Findings – The paper presents the similarities and differences in the FEI concepts between the two industries. The most similarly assessed concept is that the quality of a product or software development project can be most often influenced by succe...

Defining the Customer Dimension of PLM Maturity

Product lifecycle management (PLM) adoption includes very extensive changes in intra- and inter-organizational practices and requires new types of skills and capabilities. A controlled PLM implementation can therefore be very challenging in practice. PLM maturity models, often at least partly based on the thinking of CMM (Capability maturity modeling) can be used to make the implementation of PLM a better approachable and a more carefully planned and coordinated process. Our objective was to enhance current maturity modeling approaches on PLM implementation, and we have argued for and presented a novel PLM maturity dimension, ”customer dimension”, that we consider as an important addition to current PLM maturity models.