A Study On Knowledge Community

Twenty years before, Peter Drucker, in his article"The Coming of the New Organization", described the future companies"will be what I call an information-based organization". What characterizes such organization is KNOWLEDGE INNOVATION. Drucker predicted that these knowledge-based organizations, although producing commodities, great changes would happen on their organizational structures and business models. Doubtlessly, Drucker's prediction confirms that the evolution of innovation model is influencing organization's change greatly. Twenty years later, his concept about new organization, not only embodied in flattened enterprises and innovation alliances between companies, but dominantly realized by Knowledge Community, which engendered by Mass Knowledge Innovation.At the dawn of 21st century, industrial-era titans are learning that the real revolution is just getting started. Except this time the competition is no longer their arch industry rivals; it's the amorphous mass of self-organized individuals that is gripping their economic needs firmly in one hand, and their economic destinies in the other. For individuals and small producers, this may be the birth of a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy.These changes, among others, are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history—a world where value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive. A world where only the connected will survive. A world where only making use of the distributed resources for innovation will thrive. What is leading the revolution is Mass Knowledge Innovation (MKI).MKI is more democratic, across different kinds of boundaries, and of larger scales. Based on the low cost collaboration platform, this kind of innovation involves large numbers of individuals and organizations, including customers, lead users, suppliers, experts, small enterprises, etc. This kind of innovation aims to make use of the dispersed, heterogeneous resources to realize reproduction of knowledge, and create values finally.The evolution of innovation model asks the change of organizations. Throughout history corporations have organized themselves according to strict hierarchical lines of authority. Everyone was a subordinate to someone else—employees versus managers, marketers versus customers, producers versus supply chain subcontractors, companies versus the community. There was always someone or some company in charge, controlling things, at the"top"of the food chain.Absolutely, the classical organization model no longer fits with MKI, for the diversity of participants'knowledge backgrounds and motivations, their self-organized actions, and the loose-coupling relationships between them can not be ignored anymore. The great challenge from MKI is how to harness the individuals to collaborate.Actually, from the end of last century, more and more researchers have being expanding their horizon beyond Hierarchy, Market and their hybrid forms, but putting more attention on Communities. The former is firm-centric, fitting with innovation models based on elites, employees and alliances between companies, while the later is network-centric, needed by MKI.Knowledge Community (KC) is an expanded network, in which hundreds of thousands of innovators, including suppliers, manufacturers, investors, partners, customers, users, scientific institutions, etc., are pooled around the initiator or the hub of the community, and innovate through mass collaborations. As a totally different hand from hierarchy (the visible hand) and market (the invisible hand), the mission of KC is to eliminate the boundaries of organizations, and to realize a more democratic innovation of large scales from higher social levels.The dominant advantage of KC is effecting the individual actions by its specific organizational rules, transforming the dispersed, heterogeneous resources into collective output, i.e. new knowledge with high business values. The more turbulent the market is, the more advantages the KC shows. So, this dissertation aims to finish an exploitive research on the ORGANIZATIONAL RULES of KC, for organizational rules lay the foundations for organizations, and can help to grasp the nature of new organization as well as the essentials of organizational change.Chapter I gives an introduction for MKI. By investigating the revolution of innovation models, this dissertation points out the rise of MKI, and examines its features and organizational challenges.Chapter II provides the research framework. Based on the critical factors for success of MKI-Diversity and Congruence, this chapter sets the path for exploring these rules, which embeds in four steps of the whole process of MKI, i.e. knowledge pooling, knowledge creating, knowledge integrating and knowledge appropriating.Chapter III & IV explores these rules in details based on the analysis of individual actions. The rules for the diversity of knowledge pooling are innovation space and knowing"Who-I-am", as well as platform and boundary objects for collaboration for the diversity of knowledge creating. Rules for the congruence of knowledge integrating are quality-control mechanisms and functions of innovation capitalists, as well as expanded intellectual property and guild norms for the congruence of knowledge appropriating. At last, these rules get-together promote MKI.Chapter V conducts a Multi-cases Analysis. This analysis confirms these propositions, and sums up the specific characters of the rules for different types of MKI, as well as the relations between rules and contextual factors, i.e. differences of knowledge backgrounds and potential interests conflicts among participants.Chapter VI is conclusions and future research directions. All in all, the primary contribution of this dissertation is that it grasps the trend of knowledge innovation, initiates an exploitive research on Knowledge Community, aiming to grasp the nature of this new organization.Firstly, this dissertation explores a new innovation model-MKI, including the features of its innovation participants, its types, its key successful factors, and its organizational challenges.Secondly, this dissertation focuses on the organizational rules of KC, for these rules laying foundations for researches on KC. As litmus, these rules uncover the limitations of traditional organizations and the nature of KC. By its specific rules, KC is attracting more resources, creating more new knowledge, realizing higher business value, and ensuring more reasonable distributions of innovation interests. Thirdly, the contingency approach is used to conclude the features of these rules under different types of MKI, and sums up the relations between rules and contextual factors, i.e. differences of knowledge backgrounds and potential interests conflicts among participants, which makes these propositions on KC's organizational rules more general and of higher practice value.Besides the contributions to organization theories, this research enlightens the business practices, especially for the Chinese enterprises. The focus of their mass collaboration should be upgraded from manufacturing to knowledge innovation, which providing a great chance for Chinese enterprises to walk out the dilemma of"World Factory"and achieve global competitive advantages. Lacking resources for innovation, how to design business model based on KC, and how to make use of MKI to realize their own leveraged growth, are critical questions for Chinese enterprises.Just as Tapscott and Williams warned people,"A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish."...