Using Qualitative Research Methods in the Subject- Oriented Business Process Analysis: The Voice of the Community in a Social Media Driven Open Innovation Management Process in the Financial Service Industry

Cooperative and interactive open innovation management is quite a new approach on how financial service providers can enhance their innovation process based on social media technology. The voluntary cooperation between internal and external experts from specialist areas of business and information technology (IT) is supposed to be an important success factor to utilize as much value creating knowledge as possible inside and outside the organisation. But a voluntary participation into any innovation set-up is not the typical case within a financial service enterprise. In this paper we describe how typical barriers in such a process environment could be identified and surmounted by the establishment of dedicated roles with a supportive role behavior. To identify these roles we have used qualitative research methods within the analysis phase of the subject-oriented business process approach (S-BPM) due to the subject-centric anchoring of both concepts. By oberservation and in-depth interviewing of the innovation community this research aims to deliver a first conceptual approach towards the design of an innovation process at the interface between business and IT of a financial service provider. But the superior goal of this paper is to discuss the fit of qualitative research methods within the analytical phase of the S-BPM concept and thus the appropriateness of the S-BPM concept for the management of an open innovation management process in financial services.