Social media usage for service innovation: a resilience perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT While companies are increasingly investing in social media to foster innovation and outperform their competition, it is still unclear how social media may successfully drive corporate innovation in the service context. Drawing on the resource-based view and the organizational resilience literature, this study empirically examines the indirect impact of social media usage on service innovation. Based on responses from 235 Chinese firms, we test our theoretical model using variance-based structural equation modeling. We find that social media usage has a positive impact on incremental service innovation through precursor resilience and that it enhances radical service innovation through improvisation resilience. Furthermore, technical modularity strengthens the positive effects of social media usage on precursor resilience while weakening the effects of social media usage on improvisation resilience. Our study enriches the literature by providing a nuanced understanding of the role of social media usage in service innovation.