Assessing value creation in digital innovation ecosystems: A Social Media Analytics approach
Introduction
Organisations must create value for their success and survival (Adner and Kapoor, 2010, Tantalo and Priem, 2016). The topic of value creation, referring to the relative amount of value that contributes to the utility of the final good or service to end users (Lepak et al., 2007, Bowman and Ambrosini, 2000, Pagani, 2013), has gained considerable attention in extant literature (Grönroos and Voima, 2013). The process of value creation itself needs to consider the nature of value categories. Thus, a key distinction ought to be made in terms of value creation and value categories. In the literature, value categories refer to the attributes of value in terms of, for example, functional, social and emotional value (Sweeny and Soutar, 2001). These underlying value categories subsequently contribute to value creation.
Parallel to the evolvement of literature on value creation, a growing number of organisations have created digital innovation in terms of new products and service offerings. Such organisations use digital technologies to create value and provide great significance and benefits to the economy (Yoo et al., 2010). Digital innovation not only alters individual businesses and their business models but also entire innovation ecosystems (Adner and Kapoor, 2010, Loebbecke and Picot, 2015). In the case of digital innovation, value is created by organisations from their activities and interactions with stakeholders. These interactions occur within the digital innovation ecosystems of specific market, regulatory and environmental contexts within which the organisations operate. The term ‘innovation ecosystem’ arises from an early concept of a natural ecosystem comprising of elements that function together to maintain an equilibrium state (Suseno and Standing, 2017). Moore (1996: 26) highlights a business ecosystem as “an economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organisations and individuals - the organisms of the business world.” In much the same way, a digital innovation ecosystem models the interactions and relationships between organisations and stakeholders, in creating new products and services using digital technologies in order to create value. Indeed, the accelerating pace of change means that success through innovation is about disruption in many forms and, perhaps most importantly, in terms of how value is created within the ecosystems.
Despite an implicit assumption of the importance of stakeholder interactions in digital innovation ecosystems, the role of interactions between stakeholders for value creation has not been widely discussed in the digital entrepreneurship and innovation literature (Grönroos and Voima, 2013). Extant studies are mainly focused on how firms create value on their own, such as those examining factors that facilitate value creation (e.g. Lan et al., 2017, Zwass, 2010). With a focus on the firm’s side when discussing value creation, existing studies are still limited in two major ways.
First, how value is created as a result of stakeholder interactions remains unclear and specific practices to create value remain underspecified (Lepak et al., 2007, Tantalo and Priem, 2016). Sorensen and Drennan (2017) argue that extant research has neglected to examine value-creating practices in social media-based communities, indicating the limited empirical studies on value-creating practices. Moreover, the changing character of value resulting from the growth of the digital economy (Kumar and Reinartz, 2016) highlights the fact that value is no longer static and that there is a possibility of multi-dimensional value-creating practices in the context of digital innovation (Sánchez-Fernández and Iniesta-Bonillo, 2007). Thus, empirical assessments are needed with regard to examining value-creating practices for value creation as a result of the interactions between stakeholders.
Second, existing literature in the innovation management and Information Systems (IS) literature also lacks empirical studies of assessing value categories. Value categories, predominantly examined in the marketing/consumer behavior literature, are related to the different value that customers have of a certain product and/or service. Despite research on value categories particularly in the marketing/consumer behavior literature, our understanding is still limited in terms of how to integrate the diverse value categories. As Velamuri et al. (2011: 27) note, a “systematic integration of the diverse value-creating concepts” and a “systematic empirical assessment” of how value categories can lead to value creation, is certainly needed.
To fill the research gaps, this paper aims to explore how value is created through new value-creating practices and the merging of value categories as a result of the interactions of stakeholders in digital innovation ecosystems. We do so by applying the methodological approach of Social Media Analytics (SMA) which is an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to combine, extend and adapt methods for analysing social media data (Stieglitz et al., 2014, Stieglitz et al., 2018). By utilising the associated Social Media Analytics framework for the purpose of social media tracking, data preparation and data analysis, we analyse how users of social media associate value to Storytel. It has emerged in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, which is internationally renowned for its vibrant start-up scene (Davidson, 2015). Storytel is a new entrant in the Swedish publishing industry, offering digital innovation in the form of a digital subscription service providing unlimited access to streamed audiobooks. Storytel enjoys a considerable growth rate by continuously interacting with a wide range of stakeholders taking part in its ecosystem. Storytel’s digital innovation ecosystem highlights the interactions between Storytel and its stakeholders, those in the consumer domain and others in the professional domain, in creating value from its digital innovation. Drawing from collected empirical material of 2633 user-generated contents, our findings reveal the multi-dimensional practices arising from the interactions of stakeholders drawn both from the consumer and professional domains of Storytel’s digital innovation ecosystems. The continuous interactions of the consumer and professional stakeholders in social media then give rise to the hybridisation of value as multiple values drawn from existing value categories become merged within Storytel’s digital innovation ecosystems.
Our study provides two main contributions to extant literature on the management of innovation and IS. First, the study sheds light on how value is created by examining value-creating practices as a result of the interactions between stakeholders. Second, we contribute by examining the resulting merging of value categories within digital innovation ecosystems and thus exploring the hybridisation of value.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. We first provide a review of digital entrepreneurship and digital innovation with a specific focus on value creation and the different value categories presented in extant literature. Following this, we elaborate on our method of SMA, including the procedures for data collection and analysis. We then present our results in the context of consumer and professional domains of stakeholders and the interactions between them. We then outline our discussion of findings with our contributions and implications, and finally conclude with limitations and directions for future research.
Section snippets
Digital entrepreneurship and digital innovation
Research in the field of entrepreneurship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of digital entrepreneurship in the field of IS (Del Giudice and Straub, 2011). Digital entrepreneurship facilitates the exchange, transfer and acquisition of knowledge through the use of technology to initiate new ways of doing business. Information technology (IT) systems through web-based platforms facilitate peer-to-peer activities which then enable digital entrepreneurs to offer new and unique
Method
To explore multi-dimensional practices and how different value categories are merged through the interactions of stakeholders in digital innovation ecosystems, user-generated contents drawn from social media platforms were used as the empirical scope. Data collection in social media has become increasingly popular and methods associated with analysing social media have also evolved considerably in recent years in close alignment to the continuous ‘restructuring’ of the social media landscape (
Findings
Table 2 presents the multi-dimensional value-creating practices and illustrative data examples identified across the consumer and professional domains. Table 3 presents the distribution of frequency and share of each practice and how these practices are interrelated to extant value categories for each respective stakeholder domain.
Discussion
With regards to assessing value creation in digital innovation ecosystems, the presented findings illustrate how stakeholders, drawn from the consumer and professional domains, integrate different value categories through multi-dimensional value-creating practices, when interacting in social media.
The understanding of value creation has been centred on the firm, i.e. on factors that facilitate value creation primarily focusing on a firm’s perspective. Our results highlight that value creation
Conclusion
In this paper, we have explored how value is created through multi-dimensional practices and the hybridisation of value as a result of the interactions of stakeholders in digital innovation ecosystems. Applying the methodological approach of Social Media Analytics (SMA), our findings reveal how stakeholders in social media, drawn from both the consumer and professional domains, associate a wide array of value categories to Storytel’s digital innovation. Our findings suggest that the boundaries
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