Social Communities and Open Innovation

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,7, University of Applied Sciences Münster, course: Strategic Management, language: English, abstract: "Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endowsresources with a new capacity to create wealth" states Peter F. Drucker.Innovation is the introduction of new things, ideas or ways of doing somethingaccording to the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. But if we go deeply into itsmeaning, innovating is not only creating something new but rather creating somethingnew that is made useful for people (McKeown, 2008). Innovation is a positive changethat can be reflected in new products, services, processes and even business models.There is a very important difference between an innovation and an invention. Aninvention is the process of concreting an idea and turning it into reality, which can be aproduct. Nevertheless this product will be an innovation only if it fulfils the demands ofa specific market and creates value for the consumers. In other words, an innovation isthe commercialization of an invention.Once having understood the importance of innovation this paper will take you throughthe different sources of innovation and the open innovation model, so it makes it easierto follow the relation and the influence social communities have on them.To give a background for the content of this paper it is important that some concepts areunderstood. For starters, Web 2.0 is the interactive and collaborative Internet, wherepeople not only can download applications and read information online, but ratherupload files and share things in a dual way of communication with other people online.People interact with other users and can give their opinion on everything whenever theywant to. It is through social communities that people interact mainly with each other bywriting, commenting and sharing posts, comments, articles, photos, videos andapplications among other things.