Social media within sustainable product development: an exploratory multiple case study on the perception of social media usability in the new product development process

Social media can be a useful tool in order to interact with customers and open up innovation efforts. Our case studies of firms aim to outline if, how and why social media is utilised in their product development processes. Our results show that the use of social media within product development is limited among our respondents, mainly due to limited resources in combination with a low amount of customers. The results show that a low number of customers impede the ability to realise the possible gains of using social media to facilitate communication among a large number of users. Additional challenges are perceived to be the difficulty in controlling content, measuring gains and dealing with security issues. There is no consensus among the respondents with regard to social media's perceived future potential within product development; some are quite hesitant, other companies anticipate increased potential in the future.