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An increasing number of companies are trying to make sense of the world of social media tools and their implication for innovation and product development.

I'm doing a research to better understand how social media creates value and sustainable advantage in the product development and innovation processes. I'm thinking of conducting a survey and some qualitative expert interviews.

What are relevant questions to ask to evaluate how social media creates value in innovation and product development? Can you provide me with some real life examples/cases (both succesful and less succesful) of companies utilising social media for innovation & product development?

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+1 for finding another use for social media. :-) – Kenneth Vogt May 23 '11 at 16:22

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Social media such as Twitter can give you access to customers, non-customers and flows of conversations and ideas. Surfacing ideas in an open community that is less Q&A oriented provides another path to validating and discussing ideas that expand into larger conversations.

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In product development space there are companies like Quirky.com, Ponoko.com, and many more. If you consider T shirt as a product too, then you have threadless.com. Many PLM companies such as Siemens, Symantec, PTC are bringing out social media enabled products

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I think Stackexchange / Stackoverflow is a great example of a "social" site that creates great value for its users.

Other success example: Kickstarter. Innovative way for bands to get financial support not from record company but from fans.

Hope it helps.

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