Leveraging innovation spaces to foster collaborative innovation

Companies increasingly seek to foster collaborative innovation through the design of innovation spaces such as incubators, accelerators, studios, and fab labs. Innovation spaces bring together multiple actors for collaborative practices to generate new products and processes. Despite their growing popularity, many innovation spaces fail to deliver on their promises and are subsequently shut down. How can innovation spaces foster effective collaborative innovation? This article illustrates the role of space and boundary objects to facilitate collaborative innovation. Based on illustrative examples from the context of business studios, the findings show that innovation spaces enable the four affordances of convergence, generativity, socialization, and collaborative learning. Managers who design and run innovation spaces need to leverage these affordances to propel collaborative innovation.     

Leveraging clustering to improve collaborative filtering

Extensive work on matrix factorization (MF) techniques have been done recently as they provide accurate rating prediction models in recommendation systems. Additional extensions, such as neighbour-aware models, have been shown to improve rating prediction further. However, these models often suffer from a long computation time. In this paper, we propose a novel method that applies clustering algorithms to the latent vectors of users and items. Our method can capture the common interests between the cluster of users and the cluster of items in a latent space. A matrix factorization technique is then applied to this cluster-level rating matrix to predict the future cluster-level interests. We then aggregate the traditional user-item rating predictions with our cluster-level rating predictions to improve the rating prediction accuracy. Our method is a general “wrapper” that can be applied to all collaborative filtering methods. In our experiments, we show that our new approach, when applied to a variety of existing matrix factorization techniques, improves their rating predictions and also results in better rating predictions for cold-start users. Above all, in this paper we show that better quality and more quantity of these clusters achieve a better rating prediction accuracy.     

Determinants of knowledge seeking in professional virtual communities

As knowledge management systems within organisations, professional virtual communities (PVCs) are popular knowledge-seeking tools, which bring together geographically dispersed members from outside of the organisations. An increasing number of employees use PVCs for knowledge seeking, knowledge exchange and problem solving at work. Why do members choose to receive knowledge from other community members in PVCs needs to be understood. This paper extends Ajzen's [1991. The theory of planned behaviour. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50 (2), 179–211] theory of planned behaviour to elicit external beliefs in terms of personal motivation, as well as technological and social factors, and to examine the relative importance of these factors. According to this study's online survey of 323 members in three PVCs, the results show that the significance of beliefs, such as system quality, compatibility, trust, knowledge growth and knowledge quality, in creating positive attitudes towards knowledge seeking. Community identification is shown as a salient belief for the subjective norms of knowledge seeking. System quality and resource availability are revealed as important determinants for perceived behavioural control of knowledge seeking. Knowledge-seeking intention is based on the attitude towards knowledge seeking and the subjective norm of knowledge seeking, whereas knowledge-seeking behaviour is solely determined by knowledge-seeking intention. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Fostering the determinants of knowledge sharing in professional virtual communities

Professional virtual communities (PVCs), which are formed on the Internet, are expected to serve the needs of members for communication, information, and knowledge sharing. The executives of organizations should consider PVCs as a new innovation or knowledge pool since members share knowledge. However, many PVCs have failed due to members’ low willingness to share knowledge with other members. Thus, there is a need to understand and foster the determinants of members’ knowledge sharing behavior in PVCs. This study develops an integrated model designed to investigate and explain the relationships between contextual factors, personal perceptions of knowledge sharing, knowledge sharing behavior, and community loyalty. Empirical data was collected from three PVCs and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) to verify the fit of the hypothetical model. The results show that trust significantly influences knowledge sharing self-efficacy, perceived relative advantage and perceived compatibility, which in turn positively affect knowledge sharing behavior. Furthermore, the study finds that the norm of reciprocity does not significantly affect knowledge sharing behavior. The results of the study can be used to identify the motivation underlying individuals’ knowledge sharing behavior in PVCs. By investigating the impacts of contextual factors and personal perceptions on knowledge sharing behavior, the integrated model better explains behavior than other proposed models. This study might help executives of virtual communities and organizations to manage and promote these determinants of knowledge sharing to stimulate members’ willingness to share knowledge and enhance their virtual community loyalty. As only little empirical research has been conducted on the impact of knowledge sharing self-efficacy, perceived relative advantage, and perceived compatibility on the individual’s knowledge sharing behavior in PVCs, the empirical evidence reported here makes a valuable contribution in this highly important area.     

Leveraging online communities in fostering adaptive schools

There has long been a call for schools to prepare students for the twenty-first century where skills and dispositions differ significantly from much of what has historically characterized formal education. The knowledge based economy calls for policy and pedagogical efforts that would transform schools. Schools are to foster communities of learners. This paper suggests that para-communities may be points of leverage in the fostering of adaptive schools. A critical analysis is done on the differences between para-communities (such as online communities) and schools; and an argument is made that they each serve differing goals and should be left distinct because they achieve different societal and economic demands.     

COWB: A cloud-based framework supporting collaborative knowledge management within biomedical communities

Despite the large acceptance of Semantic Web technologies and their key role in bioinformatics, some concerns begin to emerge about their suitability for supporting the requirements of collaborative environments where a research community shares and creates new knowledge. The paper discusses these concerns and proposes COWB (COllaborative Workspaces in Biomedicine), a framework which supports collaborative knowledge management in the context of biomedical communities. COWB is grounded on a multi-layer ontology-centric model. It harnesses both the semantic knowledge captured from ontologies and the functional knowledge about resources which extend the domain knowledge and support its management. Public and private workspaces provide an accessible representation of the collective knowledge that is incrementally created and allow the knowledge to cross the boundaries of closed local information. The paper presents the deployment of COWB in a cloud platform which severely curtails issues associated with scalability and performance. The paper shows the suitability of the proposed approach and aims to suggest how exploiting the potential of the Semantic Web technologies in the context of emergent technologies including Web 2.0, NoSQL databases and the cloud paradigm.     

Critical IS professional activities and skills/knowledge: A perspective of IS managers

This study utilized the activity competency model to investigate the perceived importance of critical professional activities and skills/knowledge required by three levels of information system (IS) managers. Our findings indicated that the perceived importance of critical IS professional activities were significantly different among the management levels, but not significantly different for various industry types. Carrying a critical IS activity out involves the use of a number of different skills and/or knowledge. A portfolio of the professional activities and the needed skills/knowledge at each management level are identified. The results of this study have implications for IS professional development and training. They can also serve as a guideline for recruiting the right IS managers and developing IS curriculums.     

Supporting teachers' intervention in collaborative knowledge building

In the context of distributed collaborative learning, the teacher's role is different from traditional teacher-centered environments, they are coordinators/facilitators, guides, and co-learners. They monitor the collaboration activities within a group, detect problems and intervene in the collaboration to give advice and learn alongside students at the same time. We have designed an Assistant to support teachers' intervention in collaborative knowledge building. The Assistant monitors the collaboration, visualizes it and provides advice to the teacher on the subject domain and the collaboration process. The goal of the research present in this paper is to explore the possibilities of enriching Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments with tools to support collaborative interaction.     

Utilizing knowledge context in virtual collaborative work

The understanding of knowledge can be impaired if it is isolated from the proper context. Despite the importance of contextual information, there has been limited support for utilizing context in current knowledge management and collaborative systems. This paper presents a knowledge context model, called KC-V, which facilitates the use of contextual information in virtual collaborative work. Four benefits of using KC-V are suggested: evolutionary accumulation of knowledge aligned with collaborative activities, supporting the virtual team lifecycle, improved understanding by rich navigation paths, and searching for knowledge with similar context. A web-based collaboration system called VWSS is developed using KC-V.     

Adaptive notifications to support knowledge sharing in close-knit virtual communities

Social web-groups where people with common interests and goals communicate, share resources, and construct knowledge, are becoming a major part of today’s organisational practice. Research has shown that appropriate support for effective knowledge sharing tailored to the needs of the community is paramount. This brings a new challenge to user modelling and adaptation, which requires new techniques for gaining sufficient understanding of a virtual community (VC) and identifying areas where the community may need support. The research presented here addresses this challenge presenting a novel computational approach for community-tailored support underpinned by organisational psychology and aimed at facilitating the functioning of the community as a whole (i.e. as an entity). A framework describing how key community processes—transactive memory (TM), shared mental models (SMMs), and cognitive centrality (CCen)—can be utilised to derive knowledge sharing patterns from community log data is described. The framework includes two parts: (i) extraction of a community model that represents the community based on the key processes identified and (ii) identification of knowledge sharing behaviour patterns that are used to generate adaptive notifications. Although the notifications target individual members, they aim to influence individuals’ behaviour in a way that can benefit the functioning of the community as a whole. A validation study has been performed to examine the effect of community-adapted notifications on individual members and on the community as a whole using a close-knit community of researchers sharing references. The study shows that notification messages can improve members’ awareness and perception of how they relate to other members in the community. Interesting observations have been made about the linking between the physical and the VC, and how this may influence members’ awareness and knowledge sharing behaviour. Broader implications for using log data to derive community models based on key community processes and generating community-adapted notifications are discussed.     

A meta-model for knowledge configuration management to support collaborative engineering

This paper focuses on industrial design and simulation processes especially in automotive and aerospace areas. Designers use business models (called expert models) such as CAD (computed aided design) and CAE (computed aided engineering) models to optimize and streamline the engineering process. Each expert model contains information such as parameters, expert rules, mathematic relations (parametric models, for example) which are shared by several users and in several different domains (mechanical, thermal, acoustic, fluid, etc.). This information is exploited at the same time in a concurrent engineering context. It is the basis of an imperfect collaboration process due to the fact that existing tools do not manage encapsulated information well and are unable to ensure that parameters and rules are consistent (same value of parameters for example) throughout different heterogeneous expert models. In this context, we propose an approach to manage knowledge using configurations synchronized with expert models which enable designers to use parameters consistently in a collaborative context. Our approach is called KCModel (knowledge configuration model): it allows acquisition, traceability, re-use and consistency of explicit knowledge used in configuration.     

What knowledge is important to a software professional?

Efforts to develop licensing requirements, curricula, or training programs for software professionals should consider the experience of the practitioners who actually perform the work. We surveyed software professionals representing a wide variety of industries, job functions, and countries to learn which educational topics have proved most important to them in their careers and to identify the topics for which their education or current knowledge could be improved     

Developing Web literacy in collaborative inquiry activities

Although many children are technically skilled in using the Web, their competences to use it in a critical and meaningful way are usually less well developed. In this article, we report on a multiple case study focusing on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative inquiry activities as an appropriate context to acquire Web literacy skills in primary education. Four 5th grade school teachers and their students worked with collaborative inquiry activities on the subject of ‘healthy food’. The project was aimed at both the development of Web literacy skills and content knowledge building. Data from a variety of sources were collected: videotaped and written lesson observations, interviews with teachers and students, teacher diaries, student questionnaires, and student assignments. The teachers appeared to be able to carry out the program to varying degrees. Contextual factors that influenced the realization of the project’s goals and results were the adequacy of the research questions formulated by students, students’ inquiry skills, and the teachers’ teaching styles. Students’ learning results show that it is possible to teach Web literacy skills in the context of collaborative inquiry activities. All classes show knowledge gain with regard to the subject healthy food and all classes but one show knowledge gain with regard to Web literacy skills. Although many students show adequate use of particular Web searching, reading and evaluating skills after the project, inconsistency, impulsiveness and impatience are also typical of their Web behaviour. In the context of collaborative inquiry activities teachers are challenged to deal with the paradox that they want their students to be active knowledge builders with help of the Web, whereas the Web seems to invite students to be more or less passive searchers.     

Collaborative information environments to support knowledge construction by communities

Computer-based design environments for skilled domain workers have recently graduated from research prototypes to commercial products, supporting the learning of individual designers. Such systems do not, however, adequately support the collaborative nature of work or the evolution of knowledge within communities of practice. If innovation is to be supported within collaborative efforts, thesedomain-oriented design environments (DODEs) must be extended to becomecollaborative information environments (CIEs), capable of providing effective community memories for managing information and learning within constantly evolving collaborative contexts. In particular, CIEs must provide functionality that facilitates the construction of new knowledge and the shared understanding necessary to use this knowledge effectively within communities of practice.This paper reviews three stages of work on artificial (computer-based and Web-based) systems that augment the intelligence of people and organisations. NetSuite illustrates the DODE approach to supporting the work of individual designers with learning-on-demand. WebNet extends this model to CIEs that support collaborative learning by groups of designers. Finally, WebGuide shows how a computational perspectives mechanism for CIEs can support the construction of knowledge and of shared understanding within groups. According to recent theories of cognition, human intelligence is the product of tool use and of social mediations as well as of biological development; CIEs are designed to enhance this intelligence by providing computationally powerful tools that are supportive of social relations.     

Epistemic activities and collaborative learning: towards an analytical model for studying knowledge construction in networked learning settings

The aim of this paper is to provide an analytical model for studying knowledge creation among geographically dispersed students in an online postgraduate programme by using the concept of epistemic activity. Rooted in qualitative methodologies, it takes a case study approach which strengthens the grounding of theory on social learning by using triangulation of evidence from online discussions and seven semi‐structured interviews. The analytical model that emerges, distinguishes a set of moves that serve understanding negotiation of meaning and co‐construction of knowledge in online discussion. The findings of the study suggest that knowledge advancement processes can be understood as part of identifying key strategies in the form of online epistemic activities for postgraduate learners in a networked learning context. The paper offers a conceptual account for researching knowledge construction in higher education.     

Designing collaborative environments for strategic knowledge in design

This paper considers aspects of strategic knowledge in design and some implications for designing in collaborative environments. Two key questions underline the concerns. First, how can strategic knowledge for collaborative design be taught and second, what kind of computer-based collaborative designing might best support the learning of strategic knowledge? We argue that the support of learning of strategic knowledge in collaborative design by computer-mediated means must be based upon empirical evidence about the nature of learning and design practice in the real world. This evidence suggests different ways of using computer support for design learning and acquisition of strategic design knowledge. Examples of research by the authors that seeks to provide that evidence are described and an approach to computer system design and evaluation proposed.