Social Network-Aware Interfaces as Facilitators of Innovation

Abstract

Achieving continuous innovation in organizations requires a balance between exploiting yet acquired knowledge and exploring new knowledge. In addition to having the adequate resources, change and innovation capabilities require specific management support and organizational structures. Recent research has pointed out the importance of social network structure and of the activity of agents that work across domains or disciplines in the innovation-oriented behaviour of organizations. As a consequence, information systems should ideally be able to support the analysis, development and management of such social structure for the benefit of organizational objectives. Current social network interfaces provide an established mental model to workers that can be hypothesized to be adequate for supporting activities that foster innovative behaviour. That behaviour is facilitated through exposing the activities of other workers across organizational structures. This paper reports on the design of a user interface specifically targeted to manage the social aspects of innovation based on some aspects of Hargadon’s model of innovation and knowledge brokering. The emergent nature of interactions in social network sites is used as the metaphor to foster situated cognition. The interface design assessment is described and some metrics for innovative behaviour that could be derived for such an interface are sketched.