Assessing value creation in digital innovation ecosystems: A Social Media Analytics approach

Abstract

This paper explores the creation of value through the interactions of consumer and professional stakeholders in digital innovation ecosystems. We examine this 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. By utilising the SMA framework to track user-generated contents published on social media platforms, we assess how consumer and professional stakeholders associate value to Storytel, a new entrant in the Swedish publishing industry that is offering digital subscription service for streaming audiobooks. Drawing from a dataset of 2633 user-generated contents, our findings illustrate the value-creating practices in which stakeholders in Storytel’s ecosystems associate value to Storytel’s digital innovation. Our findings further highlight that the value-creating practices arising from the interactions of consumer and professional stakeholders in social media give rise to the hybridisation of value, where multiple values drawn from existing value categories become merged in the studied case. This study contributes to extant literature on management of innovation and information systems by (i) shedding light on how value is created by examining value-creating practices as a result of the interactions between stakeholders and (ii) examining the resulting merging of value categories within digital innovation ecosystems and thus exploring the hybridisation of value.