Facebook Era, The: Tapping Online Social Networks to Market, Sell, and Innovate, 2/e

7. Innovation and Collaboration in the Facebook Era

“Social networking is becoming social innovation. A new mode of invention and production is in the making.”

—Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics

Innovation—the introduction of a new and useful method, process, product, or service—is the lifeblood of business and, indeed, of civilization. Innovation comes in many forms. This chapter focuses on product innovation, although you can apply the ideas presented here to other kinds of innovation.

Roughly speaking, the innovation process has four stages: generating concepts, prototyping, commercial implementation, and continual iteration (see Figure 7.1). Although these stages aren’t clear cut or sequential, they have guided most innovations in history. ...