The Role of Social Media in an Inspirational Approach to Product Design and Designer Performance

Abstract

Social media has encouraged a large number of organizations to design their work patterns to facilitate their employees through social media adoption. This study examines the effects of enterprise social media and public social media on the novelty-focused product design, and efficiency-focused product design that eventually explain the performance of the designers. Empirical analysis based on time-lagged, multi-source data set indicate that both enterprise social media and public social media are an important source of product designer's inspiration which are positively related to novelty-focused design and efficiency-focused product design. Results further indicate that efficiency-focused product design has a stronger impact on designer performance than novelty-focused design. Theoretical implications and practical implications are discussed in the later sections.

Keywords: designer performance; efficiency-focused product design; enterprise social media; novelty-focused product design; public social media.