Supporting participatory innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparative study of enterprise social media use

Purpose The need for accelerating innovation is exacerbated as organizations struggle to either adapt or perish in this unforgiving condition due to the COVID-19 disruption. To address this issue, many organizations have embraced employee-driven participatory innovation to survive and thrive albeit the uncertainties. This study aims to investigate the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in supporting and facilitating these efforts. Design/methodology/approach This study first identified the underlying mechanisms that allow ESM use to foster and maintain participatory innovation and then reexamined how these mechanisms played out during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The data was collected through a questionnaire in two phases, before and during work-from-home mandates, and the results were analyzed and compared to capture similarities and differences. Findings The results revealed that innovation culture and management support mediated the effects of ESM use on three measures of innovation productivity in both conditions. Interestingly, the effect of ESM use was more prominent in driving innovation in the work-from-home condition. This effect was not limited to the direct effect of ESM use on innovation productivity but on innovation culture and management support as well. Originality/value The results suggest that ESM offer a potentially useful path to support and enable employees to participate in the innovation processes, especially when they work remotely or in a distributed team. More generally, this paper should be of interest to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, implementing and evaluating enterprise social software applications and encouraging employee-driven participatory innovation.

An authentic social learning model to improve collaboration and engagement in online and hybrid K-12 classrooms

K-12 education experienced an unprecedented disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Classrooms moved from brick and mortar to online or hybrid classroom models with little training for teachers or students. During distance learning, students became disengaged learning through a computer screen. Collaborative learning, a key to engaging students in K-12 classrooms, was difficult or eliminated in online and hybrid models. This case study explores the experiences of K-12 teachers who implemented a social learning model during the COVID-19 pandemic. The case study supports the importance of authentic social learning as a new pedagogical approach for engaging students in collaborative social learning in K-12 hybrid and online classrooms. As a result, this paper proposes the Authentic Social Learning Model (ASLM) as a model for advancing the effective implementation of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in K-12 classrooms and provides recommendations for classroom technology to implement this model in current and future face-to-face, online, and hybrid classrooms. © AMCIS 2021.