Knowledge community platforms: Creation, activation and sharing of intellectual capital

Innovation depends among others upon knowledge sharing and knowledge creation  (Darroch, 2005, Leonard-Barton, 1995).The search for relevant information, the access to external knowledge, its transfer, and integration into the company are crucial activities (Almeida et al., 2003); (Kogut and Zander, 1992);(Nooteboom, 2000) .That was also the ulterior motive when IBM executives conceived the idea of a “Jam” – massively parallel online conference (Bjelland and Wood, 2008). Since 2001, IBM has used jams to involve its more than 300,000 employees around the world to generate valuable new ideas. The combination of knowledge from employees with various backgrounds grants access to distributed knowledge (Tsoukas, 1996) new insights (Lesser and Storck, 2001), and can outstrip the knowledge endowment of an individual contributor. Since knowledge is context specific and constructed through social negotiation and interpretation (Brown and Duguid, 1998, Elkjaer, 2003, Swan et al., 2002); the joint discussion creates a common understanding and stimulates the creation of new knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) and creative ideas (Hienerth, 2004, Sawhney and Prandelli, 2000). Companies inevitably are faced with the task and challenge to transform this enormous pool of innovation, knowledge and creativity into a sustainable asset for competitive advantage, into intellectual capital.

In global multinational organizations, business processes are no longer bound by time, location, or the organizational structure. Management thinkers like Hamel and Mintzberg proclaim that a new way of management is needed in order to leverage the innovative potential of these sources to a fuller extent (Hamel and Breen, 2007, Mintzberg, 2009).They suggest management 2.0 principles to leverage the capabilities, creativity, and knowledge of all employees and rely on web 2.0 and social media platforms. Besides appropriate innovation platforms, companies have to provide an organizational setting that enables and supports collaborative innovation (Sawhney et al., 2005) and internal crowd sourcing (Howe, 2008) or co-creation (Winsor, 2005) initiatives.

The first part of this paper explores the relationship between intellectual capital and knowledge communities. By mirroring this relationship against the management 2.0 principles the creation, activation and sharing of intellectual capital and its management in a knowledge community surrounding is discussed.

The second part of the paper presents a case study of an international company which applies knowledge communities for its innovation process putting the theoretical framework given above to test. Based on the findings managerial implications are proposed. Finally aspects for further research in knowledge communities in respect for intellectual capital are presented.