Enabling organizational ideation with cognitive dexterity using social media: an exploratory study

Abstract

Cognitive dexterity is a collective level dynamic capability to rapidly intuit, interpret, integrate and assimilate knowledge from variety of sources in order to promote enhanced ideation in a firm. We develop a Social Capital and Organizational Learning theory based model that we are in the process of validating using an exploratory qualitative research case study. The preliminary results indicate that with the advent of social media platform, firms are confronting an increasing volume, velocity and variety of information with often suspect quality. We found strong evidence that some firms are exploiting this opportunity to enhance firm level cognitive dexterity by instituting appropriate incentives, structures and processes so that high quality, varied and more ideas are generated within the firm.