Dancing With The Paradox — Social Media In Innovation Through Complexity Lens

This paper discusses the social media paradox in the context of innovation. Innovation is defined as a knowledge intensive process of seeing and doing things differently, whereas social media refers to new ways of being connected. Social media has revolutionised the ways how knowledge is produced, shared and accumulated through social interactions within the organisation and across the organisation's boundaries. From an organisational perspective, this raises the question of how social media influences — enabling or inhibiting — its ability to see and do things differently. Social media offers tempting opportunities but also poses new threats. It is a paradox involving contradictory forces. Despite growing interest among academics, there is a lack of understanding of the possibilities of social media in the specific context of innovation. This paper fills the research gap by arguing that complexity concepts offer a new type of language to understand social media. Seeing interaction as intrinsic to innovation activity, complexity thinking opens the paradox of being in charge but not in control.