Research Shows That Twitter Can Help Generate Better Ideas

Twitter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

MIT's Sloane Management Review published an article Tuesday that highlighted the value of building a diverse network on Twitter.  Researchers looked at members of five different organizations over a five year period and came up with some interesting insights:

"New research suggests that employees with a diverse Twitter network — one that exposes them to people and ideas they don’t already know — tend to generate better ideas...

...However, Twitter activity and size measures (such as the number of tweets, number of followers and number of people followed) were not correlated with personal innovation...

...In particular, two activities emerged as being significantly correlated with increasing individual absorptive capacity and personal innovation: “idea scouting” and “idea connecting.”...

...Use Twitter to become an idea scout. Several employees described Twitter as a “gateway to solution options” and a way to obtain different perspectives and to challenge one’s current thinking...

...Use Twitter to be an idea connector. Several employees mentioned how important it is to have a strategy for sharing Twitter content with the appropriate internal stakeholders. They described their roles as listener, curator and alerter..."