Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

Peer reviewe

Trust and reciprocity effect on electronic word-of-mouth in online review communities

Purpose Social media developments in the last decade have led to the emergence of a new form of word of mouth (WOM) in the digital environment. Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is considered by many scholars and practitioners to be the most influential informal communication mechanism between businesses and potential and actual consumers. The purpose of this paper is to extend knowledge about WOM in this new context by proposing a conceptual framework that enables a better understanding of how trust and reciprocity influence eWOM participation in ORCs. Design/methodology/approach This study applies non-probability convenience sampling technique to conduct a quantitative study of data from an online survey of 189 members of ORCs. Partial least squares (PLS) is used to analyse the correlations between individuals’ intention to seek opinion, to give their own opinion and to pass on the opinion of another within ORCs. Findings The data analysis reveals that opinion seeking within ORCs had a direct effect on opinion giving and opinion passing. Ability trust and integrity trust had a positive effect on opinion seeking, while benevolence trust had a direct positive effect on opinion passing. Reciprocity had a direct impact on opinion passing. While reciprocity did not affect opinion giving, the relationship between these two concepts was mediated by integrity trust. Research limitations/implications By studying the complexities that characterise the relationships between reciprocity, trust and eWOM, the study extends understanding of eWOM in ORCs. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of only a few papers that have examined the complex interrelationships between reciprocity, trust and eWOM in the context of ORCs

KNOWEDGE DEVELOPMENT WITHIN COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE USING ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

Knowledge assets are a critical resource that can generate a competitive advantage for organizations. Generally, knowledge can be divided in explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Organizations focus on managing the explicit knowledge and also on capturing the tacit knowledge embedded in the individuals’ experiences. Knowledge development represents the main purpose of the knowledge management domain, in both research and applications. Through the interactions in social networks, community-based knowledge development and sharing have become very effective tools. In this context, more and more organizations are developing communities of practice as strategic tools for knowledge development and sharing within the organization and across organizational boundaries.communities of practice, knowledge development, knowledge sharing, organizational learning

Collaborative Development within Open Source Communities

Open source communities are one of the most successful-- and least appreciated--examples of high-performance collaboration and community building on the Internet today. Open source communities began as loosely organized, ad-hoc communities of contributors from all over the world who shared an interest in meeting a common need. However, the organization of these communities has proven to be very flexible and capable of carrying out all kind of developments, ranging from minor projects to huge programs such as Apache (Höhn, & Herr, 2004; Mockus, Fielding, & Herbsleb, 2005

Concurrent collaboration in research and development

Integration is the essence of current research and development (R&D) activity in many organizations. Integration can be established in various ways depending on the type, size and intricacy in organizational functions and products. Nevertheless, research and development (R&D) has become an inevitable function in most manufacturing companies in order to develop their own product niches for their survival in the prevailing highly completion market environment. Research and development functions are fundamental drivers of value creation in technology based enterprises. Of creating and maintaining a vibrant R&D environment, organizations individually or collectively need to incorporate virtual R&D team. A virtual R\&D team can introduce new product in less lead time than by conventional R\&D working. Therefore, how to increase the possibility of having more successful R\&D is a critical issue for enterprises. This paper examines the current approach of collaboration in R\&D issues from the perspective of their impact on virtual R\&D team in enterprises and compares the findings with the other concepts of concurrent collaboration. By reviewing literature and theories, the paper firstly presents the definition and characteristics of virtual R&D teams. A comparison of different types of virtual R&D teams along with the strengths and limitations of the preceding studies in this area are also presented. It is observed that most of the research activities encourage and support virtual R\&D teams applicable to enterprises. Distinctive benefits of establishing virtual R&D team have been enumerated and demand future attention has been indicated in the paper

Knowledge sharing by entrepreneurs in a virtual community of practice (VCoP)

PurposeThis paper examines how entrepreneurs engage in a Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) to share knowledge. Intensity of engagement is taken as a proxy to measure the strength of knowledge sharing.Design/methodology/approachThe archival data spanning over a three-year period from ‘Start-up-Nation©’ (a VCoP purposefully setup for entrepreneurs) is used for analysis. A set of indices are introduced to measure participants’ intensity of engagement in terms of message length, message frequency and reciprocity in the knowledge sharing process. Content analysis is employed to test a sample of ‘highly engaged’, ‘moderately engaged’, ‘low engaged’ and ‘not engaged’ discussion topics as part of the on-line discourse.FindingsWe find that entrepreneurs normally use short (fewer than 100 words) or medium (fewer than 250 words) message size to contribute to the discussions. In addition, we find that senior members and discussion moderators play important roles in igniting the ‘reciprocity’ behaviour in stimulating the interest of the community with the topic discussion. We also findthat highly engaged topics usually lead to further discussion threads.Originality/valueThis is the first study of its kind to explore how entrepreneurs engage in a VCoP to share their knowledge and experiences. The set of measurement indices tested here provide a tool for the owner, designer and moderator of the VCoP to measure the utility of their website in terms of its members’ participation. In addition, the set of textual and subjective interventions identified here enable the moderator (administrator) of a VCoP to design effective interventions to facilitate on-line discourse and augment the knowledge sharing process amongst its community members

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Virtual teams for new product development: an innovative experience for R&D engineers

New interaction tools such as internet allow companies to gain valuable input from research and development (R\&D) engineers via virtual teams. Consequently, engineers also get more expertise in diminutive time frames. Virtual R\&D teams present the key impetus to the technology acquisition process. The present knowledge-economy era is characterized by short product life-cycles. Virtual R&D teams may reduce time-to-market, make available a large pool of new product know-how and provide greater flexibilities, which are the key success factors in a competitive market. This comprehensive review contains almost 100 references and covers the recent literature with emphasis on the topic. The review has focused on authentic and reputed publications and extracts the results. This article presents the type of virtual teams and their main features and explains how virtual R&D team can play a prominent role in developing new products. The article is evolved future study guideline and also illustrates how to apply virtual interaction tools and integrate engineers into the innovation process. Management of virtual R&D teams in new product development (NPD) processes in an innovative, effective and efficient is of a high importance, but the issue has been poorly addressed in the previous studies. Findings show that virtual R&D team provides valuable input for new product development and R&D engineers are able to attain virtual experience

Do birds of a feather flock together? Proximities and inter-clusters network

The present contribution develops on the analysis of clusters in terms of proximities by exploring the issue of distant inter-cluster collaborations. We mobilize different forms of proximity (geographic, cognitive, social) discussed in the literature in order to identify their respective influence on intercluster collaboration by taking the example of French Pôles de Compétitivité. Our results echo previous results applied to intra-cluster collaborations since inter-cluster collaboration mostly relies on a form of social capital due to the key roles played by relational and cognitive proximity. Finally, our results exhibit a negative influence of geographic distance on collaboration. JEL: C45, R12, R58 Keywords: clusters, network analysis, proximities, intercluster collaboration

Investigating the impact of networking capability on firm innovation performance:using the resource-action-performance framework

The author's final peer reviewed version can be found by following the URI link. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Purpose The experience of successful firms has proven that one of the most important ways to promote co-learning and create successful networked innovations is the proper application of inter-organizational knowledge mechanisms. This study aims to use a resource-action-performance framework to open the black box on the relationship between networking capability and innovation performance. The research population embraces companies in the Iranian automotive industry. Design/methodology/approach Due to the latent nature of the variables studied, the required data are collected through a web-based cross-sectional survey. First, the content validity of the measurement tool is evaluated by experts. Then, a pre-test is conducted to assess the reliability of the measurement tool. All data are gathered by the Iranian Vehicle Manufacturers Association (IVMA) and Iranian Auto Parts Manufacturers Association (IAPMA) samples. The power analysis method and G*Power software are used to determine the sample size. Moreover, SmartPLS 3 and IBM SPSS 25 software are used for data analysis of the conceptual model and relating hypotheses. Findings The results of this study indicated that the relationships between networking capability, inter-organizational knowledge mechanisms and inter-organizational learning result in a self-reinforcing loop, with a marked impact on firm innovation performance. Originality/value Since there is little understanding of the interdependencies of networking capability, inter-organizational knowledge mechanisms, co-learning and their effect on firm innovation performance, most previous research studies have focused on only one or two of the above-mentioned variables. Thus, their cumulative effect has not examined yet. Looking at inter-organizational relationships from a network perspective and knowledge-based view (KBV), and to consider the simultaneous effect of knowledge mechanisms and learning as intermediary actions alongside, to consider the performance effect of the capability-building process, are the main advantages of this research