How important is alignment of social media use and R&D–Marketing cooperation for innovation success?

Abstract Efforts to use social media as a network tool for open innovations have not met expectations, or utilized its potential adequately. Recent research on identifying firms’ social media skill has not addressed the complex underlying mechanisms and calibration of social media capabilities. We explore how, why, and which resources an organization should integrate. Social media in NPD should be accompanied by carefully aligned R&D – marketing cooperation. Alignment results in efficient knowledge integration, but dis-alignment fails to tap enough ideas, or can lack information processing capacity. The alignment and disalignment hypotheses are tested using survey data of a sample of 101 innovative SMEs. In a second, configurational study we extend findings from Study 1 to determine micro level social media capabilities required. Results show that social media can be used for both radical and incremental innovation, but are more useful for service than for product innovation.