CoDiT: An Integrated Business Partner Discovery Tool Over SNSs

The success of open innovation alliances depends on the right selection of business partners. Given the vast representation of business organizations on SNSs and the resulting availability of significant amount of information about their products and services, the SNSs seem to be a promising opportunity for the businesses to look for the potential partners. In this regard, this paper reviews the potential of SNSs for supporting business partner discovery. In order to address the identified inadequacies of SNSs for supporting business partner search, we present a web based search tool: CoDiT. The CoDiT system seamlessly integrates the company pages hosted on multiple SNSs by leveraging the potential of existing social networking APIs. The main premise of CoDiT system is to support open innovation process – in the ‘Find’ phase - by assisting organizations in locating complementary assets through the aggregation and exchange of the information about potential partners available on SNSs.