Virtual Communities as Role Models for Organizational Knowledge Management

Abstract

Knowledge management serves to create value from an organization’s intangible assets. Many organizations have adopted knowledge management practices in recent years. Some of those organizations have achieved success at knowledge management, but others have not. The focus of this chapter is on those organizations that have not been as successful at knowledge management as they originally planned. This chapter posits that organizations can look to virtual communities as role models for successful knowledge management because many of the features that have been identified in the literature as important for successful knowledge management are present in virtual communities. The very nature of virtual communities — their sense of community, the desire they create to share knowledge, the automatic archiving of knowledge for future use, etc. — are used in this chapter to support the claim that virtual communities can serve as role models for knowledge management in organizations.