From the Guest Editors: “Enterprise Social Media for Knowledge Management and Innovation in SMEs”

Over the last two decades, a community of scholars and practitioners focused their efforts on the development of systematic approaches to nurturing and sharing the knowledge base of the organization. Under the knowledge management (KM) umbrella, the focus of research and practice shifted from the study of traditional labor and management structures to that of processes, which take place within knowledge-based organizations to allow fewer people to be more effective through collaboration. Today, a wide range of literature highlights the pivotal role played by KM in the creation of new and useful products, services, structures, and processes. Driven by the growth in the amount of knowledge available to organizations, innovation—one of the most important management challenges that modern businesses face today—depends to a large extent on the effectiveness of KM strategies, tools, and techniques (Cegarra-Navarro, Soto-Acosta, & Wensley, 2016).

In its evolution as a discipline, KM has been challenged by the emergence and continuous developments in technologies that have made new sources of information and knowledge available to organizations from all sectors and to society. Professionals from most areas and levels, from healthcare to construction, apply technology advances on a daily basis. Broadly speaking, technology improved our quality of life and our effectiveness in the workplace.

Online platforms now enable people to communicate, usually for a social purpose, through a variety of web-based services, which offer opportunities for people to interact over the internet. Adopted as social media technologies (SMT), these services allow real-time, direct knowledge exchange between two or more people—within and outside the organization, through the use of most internet-enabled devices. In particular, the usage of social networking tools within the organization, referred to by some as Enterprise 2.0, brought radical changes to the organization in its efforts to improve performance (Soto-Acosta, Popa, & Palacios-Marqués, 2017; Popa, Soto-Acosta, & Martinez-Conesa, 2017).

Increasingly, large organizations are experimenting with social media as a platform for widespread distributed collaboration. Although still in early stages of our understanding of its benefits within organizations, research found that in certain contexts and under specific circumstances, social networking systems could foster KM processes and further influence organizational learning: key drivers to innovation. Research has shown that in the early 2000s, more than 70% of large enterprises already deployed at least one social media tool. However, practitioners and academics agree that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) follow in the wake of large companies in benefitting from enterprise social media. The literature on the topic shows that little research and few empirical studies have been carried out on the use of SMT in SMEs.

SMEs comprise a large percentage of enterprises in a nation and are responsible for employing more than half of its workforce. Although critical contributors to economic development, the levels of adoption of KM practices, strategies, and tools by SMEs have been hindered by factors including the shortage of human and financial resources that characterizes this type of firm (Martinez-Conesa, Soto-Acosta, & Carayannis 2017). However, enterprise social media are considered by many as low in cost, easy to use and highly effective technologies which support the processes of knowledge creation and sharing among organizational members. Enterprise social media therefore provides the basis for the implementation of KM within SMEs and their effective use as a driver of innovation. However, this argument only emphasizes that the scenario is in an evolutionary phase and further research efforts are now an imperative in this area.

In our efforts to contribute to the body of knowledge in this area, this special issue compiles recent work that informs researchers and practitioners on key areas defining the role of enterprise social media in fostering KM and innovation in SMEs. In doing so, this special issue provided a platform for presenting innovative findings and ideas for the KM and related fields. The range of people involved and the mix of approaches followed by them make of this special issue an excellent source of new knowledge for KM scholars and practitioners seeking to contribute to the success of SMEs.

About the articles

In their research, Vătămănescu and colleagues analyze the importance of reinforcing the relational capital of SMEs in the context of a globalized market. Their analysis focuses on understanding the differences between online and offline business networking and the effects of competitiveness on the internationalization process of European steel pipe SMEs.

From a different perspective, Iglesias-Pradas and colleagues explore the acceptance of corporate Web 2.0 applications for collaboration and knowledge sharing between employees of SMEs, stressing the importance of organizational and personal factors in collaborative settings for the adoption of corporate blogs within the organizations.

Focused on data emerging from the use of social media, Fortunato and colleagues describe how managers can identify specific contents and use of these to inform innovation strategies in the design of TV shows. More specifically, explore how big data obtained by social media can be useful for open innovation activities in the TV domain, showing that the analysis of open data coming from social media enables to increase the social media traffic and gain insights for innovation.

Approaches to innovation are also addressed by Devece and colleagues in the context of the food industry by studying the information systems strategy of the firm and whether the information systems strategy and the business strategy are independent in organizations. Meanwhile, Hua and colleagues provide insights on how social media contents influence behavior of potential tourists, and so they can help improve tourism marketing and communication strategies, demonstrating that social media sites are essential in order to reach and form positive tourists’ attitude.

The research by Scuotto and colleagues analyzes whether proposes mass collaborative KM and social media networks may tend to enhance productivity of SMEs. By carrying out a case study methodology, the authors highlight the complementary advantages of mass collaborative KM related to the use of social media networks in a SME operating in southern Italy.

Finally, Pérez-González and colleagues highlight the positive effects of SMT use for the acquisition of external information and for the sharing of knowledge and innovation performance in SMEs. More specifically, this article examines the use of SMT to acquire external competitive information, information from competitors and customers, separately, and the use of SMT to share internal information and knowledge—analyzing the effects of these three uses on the innovations results of industrial SMEs.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Dr. Janice C. Sipior, Editor-in-Chief of Information Systems Management, for this opportunity to report and disseminate research on the role of enterprise social media in fostering KM and innovation in SMEs. We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough reviews, which allowed improving the collection of articles included in this special issue. Finally, and on behalf of the journal, we hope this special issue becomes a valuable resource for both scholars and practitioners alike in the areas of KM, organizational learning, and innovation in the context of small and medium enterprises.