Idea Management in Social Networks: A Study of how to Tap into the Ideas of Facebook Communities

Idea Management (IM) has increasingly been adopted by organizations and companies to innovate their products and services. While the software systems that instrument IM definitely help in managing this practice, we have discovered that IM organizers are having problems to establish, inside these platforms, communities able to support IM initiatives; either they cannot attract enough participants or the participating people are simply not the right ones. Acknowledging that most organizations have today a presence in Facebook and are striving to grow active communities inside this social network, we propose to harness the creativity of their already established Facebook communities instead of starting innovation communities inside IM platforms. Facebook can benefit IM with large and diverse pools of active communities who may be more interested in helping tied persons or organizations. This paper introduces a method that exploits Facebook's technical affordances facilitating the execution of IM inside Facebook communities. Two independent studies demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposal to capture ideas that can lead to innovations. We conclude by discussing the strength and limitations of Facebook's technical capabilities to instrument IM.