Study On Knowledge Dissemination And Innovation Outcome In Virtual Communities Based On Complex Network

Innovation is an economic activity,which covers the entire process of research,developing,producing,and commercialization.It is the very source of key competitiveness.Open and collaborative innovation has become an important creation mode.Further with the fast development of internet and computer technology,substantial online communities that allow software development and project development have appeared,providing convenience for collaborative innovation.Knowledge dissemination in such virtual communities affects the innovative outcome of the entire community.As a result,the spreading mechanism of innovative knowledge is one of the key issues of collaborative innovation.In this paper,we explored in this paper how position property,clustering property and innovation recognition of community members affect the rate and range of innovation spread in online communities via the lens of complex network.Epidemic model is adopted in this empirical study.The results show that innovative members‘ position centrality in the community social network could affect knowledge dissemination range via its effect on the number of potential receivers.Innovation recognition has effect on knowledge dissemination speed with dissemination probability as a mediator.Clustering level has negative effect on both knowledge dissemination speed and range.Based on the empirical study results,we provided suggests for both virtual community administrators and innovative members from three perspectives: how to increase the position centrality of innovative members,how to improve innovation recognition and how to decrease clustering level.