By Hannu Kärkkäinen & Jari J. Jussila

Organisations have to learn about market needs and technological solutions increasingly quickly if they want to respond to the rapid and often unpredictable changes in their business environment. Various types of collaborative web tools and approaches, such as social media, can enable and significantly increase the collaboration and learning of business-to-business companies from their customers in various novel ways. Importantly, social media can provide quite innovative community-oriented and social ways of providing and receiving feedback from new products and concepts. Some forms of social media, such as virtual worlds, can also enable customers and companies to receive a lifelike experience from products, as well as experiment with novel concepts.