Many well-known organizations are leveraging the connective power of social media to enhance innovation in the workplace. There are clear opportunities, and potential challenges, for social networks to transform the way ideas are generated and collated.

Many employers are understandably concerned about on-the-job use of social networks because they promote informal groups of individuals which cannot be easily controlled. Yet it is Manpower’s view that this kind of structure does quite the opposite and can add value. Most of the best ideas are born out of causal conversations or exchanges rather than meetings or workshops. By giving employees shared responsibility to generate ideas it is possible to drive emotional and intellectual engagement, as it recognizes that their insights and ideas are critical to the company’s success.

Today, most organizations are set up for teams and individuals to work in silos, but social networks offer the potential to be the link between these silos, creating an open working structure. In doing so, companies create a culture where employees are encouraged to share ideas freely and easily—which means good ideas and insights become ingrained into the company culture—and work is less likely to be duplicated.

Not only can social networks help create an innovative culture inside the organization, but also social networks provide a platform for open innovation, by allowing companies to build channels to customers, academics and independent inventors who used to be hard to reach in a targeted and sustained way. IBM has launched dozens of new initiatives and improved their existing offerings and practices based on ideas drawn from its “Innovation Jams,” huge online brainstorming sessions attended by its global employees, partners and customers. Manpower Inc. Chairman and CEO Jeff Joerres has hundreds of Facebook friends who are Manpower employees from around the world. He says access to their unfiltered ideas has informed his view of the business in exciting new ways.

Social networks are also having a significant impact on smaller businesses; small business owners and entrepreneurs can use social networks as a channel to reach enormous audiences alongside bigger brands and organizations to test out ideas.

Companies have long looked for effective ways to capture the knowledge and ideas locked up in the minds of their employees. In the past, knowledge management was nothing more than a filing system or a collection of information; however, social media presents new and creative ways to systematize such efforts. Capgemini, the IT services and consulting firm, has launched an ambitious project to use such applications as blogs and wikis to help connect its 90,000 employees. Social networks create a powerful combination of knowledgeable people and insightful content in one easily accessible location.

In addition, social networks can help identify experts in a particular area or groups of people with the same knowledge and interests. Many public sites have already become a powerful tool for linking together communities of interest—groups of people connected by personal or professional interest in a particular subject matter, anything from online marketing to pharmaceutical research. These efforts can prove especially valuable in capturing and transferring knowledge across organizational silos.

To harness the power of social networks for innovation it is essential that an innovation mindset becomes institutionalized and internalized in the organization. By creating clear objectives and outcomes for a social network, this can be achieved across the organization; keeping employees informed about where their ideas are going, and what they have contributed to, will ensure they are motivated to keep fueling the innovative culture. In doing so, organizations tap into a creative culture that liberates innovation at all levels which can provide competitive advantage for the company.

		Debra Clem is the executive vice president of Manpower of Lansing, Inc.