Title

Knowledge transfer in a multiple virtual communities network

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Date of Original Version

5-7-2010

Abstract

Virtual knowledge communities (VKCs) produce and embrace priceless, and often, very unique knowledge assets within the boundary of each virtual community. An important question is how do we maximize the collateral benefits from these valuable assets at the entire VKCs network level? Relying on the graph theory, this study is to investigate how the structure of virtual knowledge network formed by knowledge transfer agents tying two communities and the knowledge profile of each VKC influence the dynamics of knowledge flow in a virtual knowledge community network (VKCN). We found that knowledge will be more efficiently disseminated when knowledge agents are uniformly distributed across the network. Furthermore, we found that an increase of VKCN complexity is maximized when a new knowledge agent is placed between two communities with the minimum information flow. The results of this study will help understand the inter-community knowledge transfer dynamics in virtual knowledge community networks. © 2010 IEEE.

Publication Title, e.g., Journal

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

COinS