Entrepreneurship and social media in the creative industries: A socio-technical perspective of entrepreneurial discovery of value opportunity and exploitation

Abstract

The research focused on explaining creative entrepreneurs’ usage of social media (SM) to express and communicate their creative aesthetics to customers from a socio-technical perspective. The explanation focused on understanding how creative entrepreneurs achieve mature usage of SM. Maturity implying SM usage such that creative processes are well integrated with internal business operations and marketing communications to create economic value. There are no extant explanatory frameworks that account for creative entrepreneurs’ use of SM to express and communicate their creative aesthetics to customers. A qualitative research methodology using in-depth interviews with creative entrepreneurs in the fashion, jewellery, and art industries, amongst others was used to collect data. The in-depth interviews were semi-structured and were designed to collect data consistent with the research objectives. Focus was placed on how social media enables opportunity seeking and how creative entrepreneurs exploit it using social media. The collected data was analysed to establish patterns that reveal how social media is used to create value. Findings reveal several patterns of maturing use of SM. Creative entreprenuers learn about SM strategy, tools, and techniques to incorporate into their core creativity processes to communicate and interact with customers. The socio-technical empirical SM maturity framework is proposed which is composed of five empirically evidenced constructs reflecting these patterns: SM discovery and strategy, SM tools, SM content, SM maturity, and Outcome. It provides insight into the aesthetic and creativity acts through SM technology of creative entrepreneurs. It reveals that creative entrepreneurs combine their aesthetic creativity, real-time marketing, and opportunity seeking on SM platforms to create economic value. They do this using the unique real-time communication and interactivity features of SM that enables real-time digital marketing of their created products. The SM maturity framework contributes an empirically validated explanation of strategic use of ABSTRACT iv SM by creative entrepreneurs for effective aesthetic value communication and interaction with customers to create value. Maturity is integration of SM into their creative processes to express and communicate aesthetic value and value creation. The practical impact is that creative entrepreneurs can use the framework for their own SM practices to express and communicate aesthetic value and value creation.