Building social media-based knowledge ecosystems for enhancing business resilience through mass collaboration

Purpose: The outbreak of COVID-19 is one of the most serious health events in recent times. In the business landscape, its effects may be more detrimental to micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) because they tend to have limited financial and human resources to manage the challenges caused by COVID-19. To help MSMEs enhance their resilience, this paper aims to discuss how they can leverage mass collaboration to build social media-based knowledge ecosystems to manage interactions among internal and external stakeholders for knowledge creation and innovation.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper proposes a model for MSMEs to build an online knowledge ecosystem and a standalone text analytics tool to use the advanced data analytics, e.g. topic modeling, to analyze and aggregate collective insights. Design science research methodology is used to develop the model and the tool.

Findings: Through mass collaboration using social media and advanced data analytics technology, MSMEs can generate new business ideas, leading to enhanced resilience to meet the challenges caused by COVID-19 or other unexpected or extraordinary circumstances, such as natural disasters and financial crises.

Originality/value: To the best of authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first papers in social media adoption for knowledge creation and innovation research, providing detailed approaches for MSMEs to build a knowledge ecosystem on social media and to use advanced data analytics to mine the meaning of the generated data.