Power to the Network: The Concept of Social Business and Its Relevance for IC

Abstract

The concept of IC puts the employee, in its potential role as crowdsource, Campaign Owner or initiator into focus. This reflects the emancipatory and participatory principle that goes hand in hand with the concept of Social Business. The basic idea of Social Business is not to link the business success of a company exclusively to its management capabilities or the business plan, but to understand and value the individual stakeholder as part of a successful enterprise network. For Social Business, value is not exclusively understood as business value; rather, the perspective is expanded to include social added value, in the sense that the value of the work for the employee, society or the environment is considered as an indirect corporate goal. Thus, Social Business is defined as a framework or strategy that uses digital social networks (enterprise social networks) with the primary goal of generating social, ecological and economic benefits. This article introduces the Social Business reference model, which supports the adoption and implementation of the outlined strategy and contrasts it to the ICU Model in order to identify the strengths as well as weaknesses of both models.