Enabling Organizational Ideation with Cognitive Dexterity using Social Media: An Exploratory Study

Cognitive dexterity is a collective level dynamic capability to rapidly intuit, interpret, integrate and assimilate knowledge from a variety of sources in order to promote enhanced ideation in a firm. Building on the social capital theory and the theory of organizational learning, we developed a conceptual model that we are in the process of validating by employing an exploratory qualitative case study. The preliminary results indicate that with the advent of social media firms are confronting an increasing volume, velocity and variety of information with often suspect quality. We found strong evidence that some firms were exploiting this opportunity to enhance their firm-level cognitive dexterity by instituting appropriate incentives, structures and processes so that larger volume and variety of quality ideas are generated within the firm.