Integrating the Crowd Through Social Media: How Higher Education Can Profit from Viral Mechanisms

The use of collaboration platforms with social media mechanisms turned out to be an efficient way to integrate costumers and external experts during the innovation processes in companies through Open Innovation. While the governmental sector more and more jumped on that band wagon, higher education hasn’t exploited the full potential yet. In this paper we analyze the project “Tomorrow’s MBA” of the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and show success factors on how social media can be used on a collaborative and integrative model. Hereby we show that the communication strategy with its diverse online and offline facets is indispensable and highlight the key success factors on how to execute an open innovation project in higher education.

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