Mikko Ahonen, Katri Lietsala University of Tampere, Hypermedia Laboratory mikko.ahonen@uta.fi, katri.lietsala@uta.

fi

Managing Service Ideas and Suggestions Information Systems in Innovation Brokering

Abstract To manage ideas and suggestions efficiently is an essential skill for firms that aim at new or better services. A new organization type called broker is emerging and these brokers utilize information technology to facilitate the innovation management for their clients. Within Open Innovation paradigm brokers act like intermediaries. The focus in this paper is on information systems referred as social media, social software or Web 2.0 which include features that could be very beneficial in binding customers as co-creators or co-innovators. After showing connections of Open Innovation, social media and collective creativity, we evaluate three Web 2.0 services that promote idea and suggestion composing. The cases are InnoCentive, Ideawicket and del.icio.us. The evaluation is focused on the brokering capabilities of these services. The article ends with discussion about crowdsourcing and possibilities of open source approaches. Key words Open innovation, service innovation, social media, online community, social software, collaboration, information system, broker

Acknowledgements We hereby thank researcher Esa Sirkkunen (University of Tampere) and researcher Noora Hintikka (Technical University of Tampere) for valuable comments.

Introduction
Traditionally, organizations utilize suggestion management systems and idea competitions to foster innovation. To establish a systematic process to capitalize on creativity is essential for enterprises that operate in accelerated business environments (Rozwell et al., 2002). Within new service development (NSD) Kelly and Storey (2000) divided this systematic innovation process to idea generation and idea screening phases. However, it has been found problematic to evaluate and screen ideas (Amabile, 1983) and to motivate users to participate in the innovation process (Fairbank and Williams, 2001). Many innovation processes and suggestion management systems are based on presumption that there exists a ready-made idea inside the firm that can be easily submitted, e.g. on a form, for evaluation (Majaro, 1998). Moreover, the tools for developing services should leave room for spontaneity and the option to participate asynchronously (King and Majchrzak, 271-272, 2003). When gathering of ideas in a closed, in-house environment is not sufficient, research and development (R&D) activity can utilize knowledge and design skills of customers as well. To take this task over, firms need tools to manage the stream of feedback and ideas from several sources, of which some are published unsolicited and outside of the firm. Data is available from various sources. There is the internal data from customer management systems, from tracks of orders, sales, staffs ideas etc., and the external data from competitors, legislators, educators, governments and state. In addition to the messages customers send as emails to the firms, customers fill in the online forms and enquiries, and comment in the corporate blogs. They also have their personal blogs for presenting their thoughts and evaluations of the surrounding world, including the services of firms. It is now a question of a proper attitude and appropriate tools whether these flows of information can be turned into knowledge worthwhile to the firms developing its service ideas. For this reason, we explore in this study the ways how modern information systems could enhance service-related ideation and brokering online. When Kelly and Storey (2000) inspected leading UK service firms, they noticed: Service firms remain steadfast in their view that ideas can be generated as and when required. In general, they do not have formal mechanisms with which to generate new ideas and only 25 per cent of them search for ideas on continual bases. One of the main barriers to innovation in service firms is the lack of expertise within the firm. It seems that many service firms are only just beginning to realize the need to be active in NDS, and as a result they do not have the necessary expertise in-house. (Kelly and Storey, 51, 2007)

There might be room for mediating bodies, brokers, in the innovation process. Brokers are individuals, groups or organisations that transmit and nurture ideas (Hargadon and Sutton 1997, Wenger 1998) through weak ties (Granovetter 1973) from one world to another. A broker organisation is a body that acts as a mediator between different firms, or like Social Media has shown, broker organisation can also mediate in peer-to-peer (P2P) or peer to business (P2B) environments. Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. (Wikipedia, 2007). Terms like social software and Web 2.0 have been used synonymously with social media. Social media has made it possible for individuals to participate in online communities and content production in ways that was not possible, say, even ten years ago. This means a growing resource for the companies who know how to manage ideas and suggestions in this kind of innovation environment. For example, in software development and support services, as Plantenga and Remery (2005) point out, one needs to have advanced skills in technology and to have autonomy at work. For people that start up their own blogs, who participate in communities like MySpace, YouTube, Grouper and Flickr, and who share their content on an everyday basis, the situation is very different. They need autonomy to do what they prefer, but advanced skills in technology are not necessary anymore since programmers have done their part developing digital environments. The user-created content in forms of blogs and wikis is an extensive source for ideas. Similarly, integrating those users to innovate new services is an opportunity for firms. There is hardly any literature about Open Innovation and Intermediaries utilizing information systems (IS) to broker ideas and suggestions within the innovation process. At the same time we have seen the rise of the social media with its new tools and applications that could help to foster innovation. With all this in mind, we want to find out whether the before mentioned social software and social media could be a key to manage service ideas and suggestions in innovation brokering. Goldcorp Challenge (Tapscott and Williams 2006, 7-10) has shown opening the field for developers not just outside of ones firm, but even outside of ones familiar network, may give much greater results than holding back to the internal infrastructure. The Goldcorp Challenge case describes how CEO Rob McEwen launched small Toronto-based gold-mining company to success by opening up all geology data to anyone who was interested analyzing it. - - put it into a file and share it with the world, he said adapting the idea of openness from Linux The Goldcorp Challenge offered 575000 dollar prize. More than 1000 people from 50 countries answered to the call, and, over 80 percent of the targets found with the help of these competitors contained significant amount of gold. The in-house geologists had identified only half of the targets Goldcorp received through the contest. What made the results even better was the knowledge the firm gained about different methods one could use for analyzing geological data. (Tapscott and Williams 2006, 710) Nowadays Goldcorp provides consulting services for other firms how to innovate. Henry Chesbrough (2003, 2006), the developer of Open Innovation paradigm, has recognized the rise of intermediaries, organizations helping other organizations to innovate. These organizations and their information systems enable exchange of idea requests and proposals.

From research method perspective, the Internet and online communities provide various data collecting methods including questionnaires, interviews, and observational techniques as well as using experimental methodology (Hewson, Yule, Laurent and Vogel 2003). Within this article case-based reasoning is used. Three Web 2.0 services are introduced and utilized as case examples of brokering systems. From our examples and data we try to identify regular patterns of brokering processes (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997). We base our article to the earlier studies (Ahonen et al., 2007), related literature and the results from Tekes funded research project Participatory Economy and Beyond: Developing tools and processes for open and participatory knowledge creation and content production (Parteco, 2007). Next we will take a look at brokers and how services can be innovated with the help of these intermediaries. Then we will discuss about Open Innovation and collective creativity. Linkages of social media, social software and information systems will be illustrated. At the end of this article, three short cases will be analysed: InnoCentive, Ideawicket and del.icio.us. Finally, in the discussion part, the limits of brokering are discussed.

Brokers and Service innovation

Structural holes theory (Burt, 1992) suggests that innovators can innovate routinely because they occupy a structural hole, a gap in the flow of information between subgroups in a larger network. For innovators, these gaps exist between industries where there was and was not knowledge about the new emerging technologies. Brokers are actors filling these gaps, and, who benefit by transferring resources from groups where they are plentiful to groups where they are dear. (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997, 717) This transferring refers to providing service ideas and explanations from one area (like airport catering) to distinctively different one (like hotel business). Hargadon and Sutton (2000) have defined following four brokering processes: capture good ideas, keep ideas alive, imagine new uses for old ideas and put promising concepts to the test. Brokering process 1. Capture good ideas Description Knowledge brokers scavenge constantly for promising ideas, sometimes in the likeliest places. They see old ideas as their primary raw material. 2. Keep ideas alive To remain useful ideas must be passed around and toyed with. Effective brokers also keep ideas alive by spreading information on who knows what within the organization. 3. Imagine new uses for old This is where the innovations arise, where old Ideas that have ideas been captured and remembered are plugged into new contexts. 4. Put promising concepts to Testing shows whether an innovation has commercial the test potential. It also teaches brokers valuable lessons, even when an idea is a complete flop. Table 1. Knowledge brokering in the innovation process (Hargadon & Sutton, 2000)

Brokering has also been discussed in the connection to Communities of Practice . Brokers make new connections across communities of practice, enable coordination, and if they are good brokers open new possibilities for meaning. The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention, and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end, brokering provides a participative connection not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multi-membership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in participation. (Wenger, 1998, 109) This view of Wenger (1998) is mostly focused on individuals and groups acting as brokers. Hargadon and Sutton (1997, 2000) focus on innovation brokering in companies. These brokering companies build up a strategy for exploiting the networked nature of the innovation process and new communities around innovative re-combinations (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997). These companies need to understand the logic of social networks. Social networks affects economic outcomes for three main reasons. First, social networks affect the flow and the quality of information. Much information is subtle, nuance and difficult to verify, so actors do not believe impersonal sources and instead rely on people they know. Second, social networks are an important source of reward and punishment, since these are often magnified in their impact when coming from others personally known. Third, trust--the confidence that others will do the right thing despite a clear balance of incentives to the contrary--emerges, if it does, in the context of a social network. (Granovetter, 2005, 33) When focusing particularly on service innovation, Den Hertog (1999) described a four-dimensional model of service innovation and pointed to the significance of non-technological factors in innovation as new service concepts, client interfaces and service delivery system. Across different circumstances, the precise role (source, carrier, and facilitator) of the intermediate service provider, and their degree of interaction with the client firm, may vary substantially (den Hertog,1999, 8). InnoCentive (http://www.innocentive.com) is an example of a broker service where this role shifts regularly, from business-to-business facilitator to public-good source. Innovation forms in services are multi-faceted. The next table of van der Aa and Eflring (2002) shows how large the innovation field can be in services.

Innovation Form 1. Multi-unit organization 2. New combinations of services 3. Customer as co-producer 4. Technological innovations

Description Reproduction of the service management system in a multi-unit organization Creating new combinations of service activities, service parts, service segments Redefining the co-producing role of the customer Development and implementation of new forms of technology and related reconfigurations of service concepts and processes

Table 2. Forms of innovation in services (van der Aa & Elfring 2002) Within this article broker services cover most of those innovation forms mentioned by van der Aa and Elfring (2002). However, since the focus in this paper is on brokering and social media, the item two, new combinations of services and the third item, customer as co-producer, are emphasized.

Open Innovation and collective creativity

The Open Innovation paradigm treats R&D as an open system. Open Innovation suggests that valuable ideas can come from inside or outside the company and can go to market from inside or outside the company as well." (Chesbrough, 1, 2006) West and Gallagher (2006) define Open Innovation as systematically encouraging and exploring a wide range of internal and external sources for innovation opportunities, consciously integrating that exploration with firm capabilities and resources, and broadly exploiting those opportunities through multiple channels. Firms practicing open innovation face three inherent management challenges, which are: 1. Maximization (including outbound licensing of intellectual property (IP), patent pooling and even giving away technology to stimulate demand for other products), 2. Incorporation (firms need to identify relevant knowledge through scanning, recognitions, absorption and political willingness to incorporate external innovation) and 3. Motivation (firms must cultivate ways to assure continued supply of relevant external technologies and IP). (West and Gallagher, 2006, 82) These challenges by West and Gallagher are linked to management of communities, too. Is the service firm capable of managing these three challenges cognitively? Earlier studies have shown that collective cognition in organizations has a significant effect on individual cognitive processes (Meindl et al. 1996, Thompson et al. 1999) to explain supraindividual cognitive processes. The concept of collective mind may explain the reasons why collaborative working, in especially, high reliability organizations increases the efficiency (Weick and Roberts, 1993).

Furthermore, the concept of collective mind may also help to explain highly creative organizations, where the emphasis on novel solutions also requires exploration mindfully (Hargadon and Bechky, 2006). Toolkits and information systems for brokering can be seen as devices supporting collective mind and distributed cognition. The establishment of distributed cognition devices, intended to organize real life experiments as preferences, tends to blur habitual distinctions between production, distribution and consumption (Thrift, 2006, 279). The same users can act as designers and consumers of others designs. But what are those interaction types that enable collective creativity? Hargadon and Bechky (2006) introduce a model of collective creativity which consists of four types of social interaction: help seeking, help giving, reflective reframing and reinforcing. This suggest that help seeking can be seen as a set of actions that individuals use to induce others to join in efforts to resolve a particular problematic situation, help-seeking behaviours, and that play a necessary role in enabling moments of collective creativity.

Help seeking

Help giving Reinforcing

Reflective reframing

Figure 1. Interaction precipitating moments of collective creativity (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006) Furthermore, Hargadon and Beckhy (2006) call reflective reframing the moment, when participants in social interactions make new sense of what they already know, comprise a third important aspect of collective creativity. They suggest also the fourth item, reinforcing activities, support individuals as they engage in help seeking, help giving, and reflective reframing and, as a result, they are also critical to enabling those moments when collective creativity emerges. This kind of mutual assistance is lacking from many brokers, like demonstrated by Ahonen et al. (2007). The collective creativity view by Hargadon and Bechky (2006) defines also additional characteristics that are required from brokers: "Because collective creativity takes place in moments when any one individual does not hold all of the necessary knowledge to construct a creative solution, the potential for a creative solution requires the domain-relevant skills of multiple participants". ... The characteristics like curiosity, a habit of reaching out for ideas and help, and a mixture of confidence and humility-help create a highly collaborative culture within knowledge-brokering firms or groups. (Hargadon and Bechky, 2006, 495).

Collective creativity buzz word differs from author to author. Tapscott and Williams (2006) list some of these words while presenting their own concept of wikinomics: To succeed, it will not be sufficient to simply intensify existing management strategies. Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles, such as openness, peering, sharing and acting globally. Tapscott and Williams (2006, 3) To keep its members involved, community needs collective trust, mutual trust to succeed (Gibson and Manuel 2003, 69-70, Gibson and Cohen 2003, 9). In summarum, recent studies (Hargadon & Bechky 2006, Farooq, Carroll and Ganoe, 2005) emphasize the need to support group creativity instead of individual creativity within Open Innovation.

Information systems and social media

When van der Aa and Elfring inspected service innovation, their conclusion was: We need to deepen our understanding of the potential influence of the new technologies, such as the Internet, on the forms of organizational innovation (van der Aa & Elfring, 167, 2002). Information systems (IS) have been traditionally utilized to support decision making and suggestion management in the innovation process. These information systems are described in large in the DSS (Decision Support Systems) literature (Marakas 2003). Word toolkit is sometimes used to describe information systems. According to von Hippel (2005) if firms understand the distributed innovation process and users roles in it, they can change factors affecting lead user innovation and so affect its rate and direction in ways they value. Toolkits for user innovation custom design offer one way to do it. This approach involves partitioning product-development and service-development projects into solution information-intensive subtasks and need-information-intensive subtasks. (von Hippel, 2005, 16) In social media people voluntarily share content (for example videos, text, images, music) through online platforms and with the help of applications that base on social software. It is typical that there are several ways for the people to communicate and to interact, and registration as a member is more of a rule than an exception. The content has its own audience as the traditional media (tv, radio, magazines, newspapers), but people themselves are editors and producers of the content. This means there is only little if no moderating for the content from others before publishing. The authors of social media enjoy content made by themselves, copied from others and mash-ups that contain a mix of content possibly from several authors. The copying and mash-ups are mainly the ones causing intellectual property rights (IPR) problems. These are the challenges, for instance, Creative Commons try to help to solve beforehand.

Social media applications typically use RSS and ATOM feeds as a way of sharing same content to several web services. Wiki technology is also very common as it gives peers option to develop others content further. Services like YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr have participants worldwide distributing and commenting content. What make them different is the openness of the forum and the network of people. According to Boyd (2005), social software encompasses one or more (though not necessarily all) of the following elements: Support for conversational interaction between people or groups. That includes real time conversations like instant messaging, and slow time conversations that occur in collaborative virtual spaces. Support for social feedback. Reputation and trust are crucial in online interactions, as demonstrated by the importance placed by sites such as eBay on a sellers rating and reputation. Support for social networks. Many Social Software applications create a digital layout of a persons social network and facilitate adding new connections.

(Boyd, 2005)

Evaluating the cases

The next cases (InnoCentive, Ideawicket and del.icio.us) are first described and then inspected with brokering processes by Hargadon and Suttons (2000) in mind.

InnoCentive (http://www.innocentive.com) Pharmaceutical maker Lilly launched InnoCentive in 2001 as a way to connect resources outside the firm people who could help in developing drugs. From this starting point, InnoCentive invited other firms which were also interested in ad hoc experts. For example, Procter & Gamble has 7500 researchers. Hiring more researchers is no more the answer for the giant. Instead CEO A.G. Lafley set a goal to source 50 percent of their innovations from outside the firm (Tappscott and Williams, 2007, 13). The companies or seekers, as InnoCentive calls them pay solvers from $10,000 to $100,000 per solution. (They also pay InnoCentive a fee to participate.) The non-profit Rockefeller Foundation area on InnoCentive's scientific platform will focus on solving the most pressing and complex humanitarian challenges posed by non-profit entities selected by the Foundation. Under the agreement The Rockefeller Foundation will select non-profit entities and others with charitable intent eligible to use the InnoCentive platform under preferred conditions, and will pay access, posting and service fees on their behalf to InnoCentive, as well as challenge awards to those researchers solving the technology problems the non-profits pose.

Figure 2. InnoCentive Brokering process 1. Capture good ideas InnoCentive as an example This capturing is limited by seekers and their proposals. Solvers will submit only ideas that match those proposals. 2. Keep ideas alive The service works one-to-one, confidentially. The original idea of the Solver can not be discussed or extended by other Solvers. However, the innovators profile is visible in the InnoCentive, so, this person may be directly contacted after this persons has showed off expertise. 3. Imagine new uses for old Both the Seeker companies and Solvers come from versatile ideas fields. This allows unexpected viewpoints and solutions to new areas. 4. Put concepts to the test Testing takes place primarily outside the InnoCentive service. Table 3. InnoCentive seen through brokering processes by Hargadon and Sutton (2000).

Ideawicket (http://www.ideawicket.com) Ideawicket.com is a company and service from New Delhi, India. It has launched an Open Innovation Portal. The site seeks to become a place where innovators and corporations can connect to exchange their innovation requirements. Unlike InnoCentive, the innovation process is innovatorled and the Ideawicket.com promises to seek (pitch) companies who could finance the innovator and further develop the original idea.

Figure 3. Ideawicket Portal

Brokering process 1. Capture good ideas

Ideawicket as an example This capturing is innovator (user) led. However, for Ideawicket staff the evaluation of novelty and usefulness of ideas may prove difficult. 2. Keep ideas alive The innovator can integrate their colleagues and friends to the innovation process. This may improve the quality of ideas. 3. Imagine new uses for old The financing companies have an opportunity to combine ideas various ideas and invite multiple innovators to work for them. 4. Put promising concepts to Ideawicket service provides certain tools to test the idea during the test the submission state. Testing takes place primarily outside the Ideawicket service. Table 4. InnoCentive inspected through brokering processes by Hargadon and Sutton (2000).

del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us)

This last case is purposively different than the earlier ones. It is not originally planned for innovation activity, more like, it was meant for collaborative bookmarking. Within del.icio.us users tag web pages with words which relate somehow in their mind to the linked web page and its content. They also pick up tags other people have selected for the same item. Those tags help in search of correct pages later from the personal Del.icio.us archive. Tags also filter a network of people who have saved the same web page or who tag with similar words. After registration users can add special icons to the navigation bar on their web browser (see icons below in the picture) to help them navigate and use Del.icio.us.

Figure 4. Icons of Del.icio.us service for navigation Del.icio.us, like many other bookmark collection managers is a tool for organising and maintaining links to web pages online, but it also helps searching partners, new ideas and weak signals. It is no surprise that Yahoo has bought the service. A service firm could begin using del.icio.us to share thoughts and ideas by collaboratively referring to relevant web sites. Like we have earlier in this article pointed out, it is a strategic question whether the firm wants to do it openly or in-house, if it needs an internal, closed system just for its employees, managers, suppliers, shareholders etc. or an open environment for the whole network, including even its competitors. According to Millen et al. (2006) public sharing of bookmarks to intranet resources may be of concern as proprietary information, albeit limited in nature, could be leaked. This limitation is solved in other services (like DogEar, http://www.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/lcdogear) Del.icio.us creates an arena for professionals to work together with amateurs (Tappscott and Williams 2007, 11). That is both its strength and weakness. Brokering process 1. Capture good ideas del.icio.us as an example Ideas can be formulated through bookmarking. The tagging process allows creating connections between different idea seeds. Collective tagging can give weak signals which kind of service ideas the present (people) network is working with. 2. Keep ideas alive Ideas as link archives and tag clouds remain in the system for years. Ideas can not be explicated within del.icio.us. However, the del.icio.us API (Application Programming Interface) allows integrating del.icio.us to advanced collaboration systems. 3. Imagine new uses for old With del.icio.uss network feature, a user can see what other ideas members are tagging. In this way, one feeds potential leads to co-developers to keep them updated with ongoing ideas 4. Put promising concepts to The notes-area could be used for collaborative testing of ideas. the test Testing takes place primarily outside the del.icio.us. Table 5. del.icio.us seen through brokering processes by Hargadon & Sutton (2000).

Conclusions
Internet offers a low-cost collaborative infrastructure. The wide range of tools help both small internal groups and massive communities to communicate their ideas and suggestions in ways no one anticipated earlier. To gain the best results from this phenomenon, firms need a strategy to decide whether the firm itself begins to build an innovation infrastructure and processes or should it contact a brokering company. Our article presents shortly some of the possibilities information systems and social media could offer for innovation brokering (Hargadon & Sutton 1997, Wenger 1998). Service firms should become more aware of social media services and investigate how communities within those services operate. For innovation brokering, taps to open depend on the business and the nature of the firm. Possible streams of ideas and suggestions come from customers, suppliers, other organizations, especially from the competing ones, and, from the public sector, academy and legislators. Some might benefit even from the third sector. After studying the main features and underlying functions of the web services mentioned earlier we conclude that these services offer an inspiring perspective for enhancing innovation. InnoCentive shows a traditional way to collect ideas. Large enterprises provide their dilemmas for Solvers to solve. However, the inclusion of Rockefeller Foundation and their focus on service ideas is useful for smaller firms as well. Ideawicket is a typical Web 2.0 service with extended collaboration features. The innovator is in the main role and the Ideawicket.com is responsible for finding financers and co-developers. Del.icio.us transforms its users into brokers whose input can be utilized by the community. First, the web site provides tools to help ones information management (organizing and reaching lists of interesting web pages) and then shares the results (addresses of tagged and described web pages) to wider audience with no additional time or energy required from the individual himself/herself. Though the prestige of intermediaries and innovation brokers in general is getting stronger, there are also signals that indicate that some brokers might lose their status unless if they do not fully understand how social networks and social media services operate. Like Tapscott and Williams (2006, 14) predict Some of these grassroots innovations pose dire threats to existing business models. They even evaluate And in the years to come, this new mode of peer production will displace traditional corporation hierarchies as the key engine of wealth creation in the economy. (2006, 18)

Discussion
There is hardly any literature about Open Innovation and Intermediaries from the perspective how information systems and social media services are utilized for service innovation. It that sense our approach is novel. However, our approach has some weaknesses as well. The evaluation time of three cases was limited and it was based on authors observations. Therefore, we intend to continue this evaluation by making a web survey for those intermediary companies and their customers in August 2007. The motivation to participate those social media services remains limited. What if there is no money as an incentive? Like West and Gallagher (2006) state: motivating individuals to generate and contribute their IP in the absence of financial returns is a significant management challenge for an Open Innovation approach. Open source software projects present a novel and successful alternative to conventional innovation models. This alternative presents interesting puzzles for and challenges to prevailing views regarding how innovations should be developed, and how organizations should form and operate. (von Hippel and von Krogh, 212, 2003). Fitzgerald (2006) discusses about Open source software (OSS) 2.0 and refers to new collaboration and business models between companies and open source communities. This OSS 2.0 is another direction we need to observe more thoroughly in the future. While the words open and openness are controversial, so is the word brokering. We admit that this articles presentation of brokering has limitations. The original brokering model of Hargadon & Sutton (1997, 2000) was based on observations at Ideo Company and how it operates. Generalizing this brokering model to service firms poses some risks. The enterprises wishing to make something out of social software and out of social media have to make sure they are the dynamic core nodes brokering streams or they have access to cores that have importance to their service business. This something that media industry already struggles with since on the web it is not just easy, but rather fast for anyone to rise up and take the lead of the information network (Bowman and Willis, 2005). By increasing the number of connections though weblogs, forums, XML syndication and collaborative publishing engines the strength of a media companys node is enhanced. (Bowman & Willis, 2003, 56). Perhaps same applies to service firms as well? We predict it does. The firms need to enhance the strength of their node to successfully benefit over the Open Innovation approach. This is the only way how they can receive voluntary developers innovate as virtual staff, like Bowman and Willis (2003) describe the grassroots actors that might be potential collaboration force for media houses. When firms look for ways to develop services or processes they are certainly quite used to call help from external consultants, ask their customers to give feedback or they listen to their staffs that help them to make and maintain services. If the firm then decides to take social media tools to manage innovation there are several strategic issues to decide. Some of the aspects are very similar to any strategic decision or implementation plan.

First, do firms have the energy, time and capabilities to not just to build, but to maintain an online community of their own? Perhaps there could be an existing community, even an external one, to utilise? Secondly, do firms have a specific task to solve, like Goldcorp had, or do they need more general way to just seek the weak signals continuously? And, thirdly, with what issues firms decide to be open about? Sometimes openness is hard even inside the firm. Not to mention when the firm should collaborate outside of its routines, networks and work environment. To figure out what lies behind feedback collected from customers or suppliers differs from managing open innovation in order to develop services. If the firm analyses on its own the ideas and suggestions it received, the process is participatory only to the point when research and development department selects some of the materials for further investigation. This makes firms customers and suppliers merely a resource. Instead of having them as a passive object and firm merely harvesting ideas, firms could change their roles into active developers. Transform the innovation process into a dialogue of the networks where the firm is the node impulses and signals go through. Or make sure the firm has an efficient and skilled broker to do this for you. Finally, the following comment from Nigel Thrift summarizes nicely our findings and provides a path for future research. The new understanding of innovation currently shows up as three associated developments: as the mobilization of forethought, as the deepening of the lure of the commodity through the co-creation of commodities with consumers, and as the construction of different kinds of apparently more innovative space suffused with information technology. (Thrift, 2006)

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