Idea Hubs as Nexus of Collective Creativity in Digital Innovation

Digital innovation radically transforms the nature of corporate innovation practices, implying a growing need for deeper understanding its origins and outcomes. In this paper, we conceptualize the focal points of social networking in digital innovation as idea hubs. We focus our analysis on instances of idea hubs in two multinational European software companies, where we conducted a case study over a two-year period, and collected data in form of interviews, digital documents, and participant observations. In doing so, we identify a set of social networking practices in which idea hubs serve as nexus of collective creativity and subject these to a critical dialectical examination. We discuss three influencing factors of idea hub choice, namely material infrastructure, innovation process phase, and personal characteristics. These explain why in a corporate environment, despite a variety of digital artifacts individuals can choose from, offline interaction still plays a major role in facilitating digital innovation.