argote@cmu.edu} M any organizations have launched online knowledge-exchanging communities to promote knowledge sharing among their employees. We empirically examine the dynamics of knowledge sharing in an organization-hosted knowledge forum. Although previous researchers have suggested that geographic and social boundaries disappear online, we hypothesize that they remain because participants prefer to share knowledge with others who share similar attributes, as a result of the challenges involved in knowledge sharing in an online community. Further, we propose that as participants acquire experience in exchanging knowledge, they learn to rely more on expertise similarity and less on categorical similarities, such as location or hierarchical status. As a result, boundaries based on categorical attributes are expected to weaken, and boundaries based on expertise are expected to strengthen, as participants gain experience in the online community. Empirical support for this argument is obtained from analyzing a longitudinal data set of an internal online knowledge community at a large multinational information technology consulting firm.

In this paper, we examine information flow across two crowdsourcing communities and provide empirical evidence on how information obtained from a customer support crowdsourcing community can help individuals generate more novel, popular, and feasible ideas in an innovation crowdsourcing community. Our findings inform firms’ decisions about whether to simultaneously host customer support and innovation crowdsourcing communities. Companies such as Dell and BestBuy simultaneously host customer support and innovation crowdsourcing communities. Yet many other companies host only innovation crowdsourcing communities. Our findings suggest that hosting both communities has benefits because a customer support community offers idea generators an opportunity to accumulate current needs information as well as to activate means information from their memory. This needs-and-means information enables idea generators to create high-quality new product/service ideas. Our findings further suggest that those firms that are already hosting two crowdsourcing communities could benefit by tracing individuals’ activities more closely. By collecting data about individuals’ microlevel activities in a customer support community, companies would be able to identify those individuals who have a higher probability of creating better ideas. By mobilizing those individuals, companies can increase the quality of ideas they obtain from innovation crowdsourcing communities.

E ffective operations require the coordination of distributed knowledge. Division and distance across teams and specialties form barriers to communication, creating insulated pockets of knowledge along geographic and specialty borders. Such fragmentation can hamper a company's ability to fully utilize existing knowledge, potentially hurting its productivity in the long run. As such, many companies have created internal online knowledge communities, in which employees can exchange solutions in various knowledge domains anywhere in the world. Although online knowledge communities offer an exciting potential to mobilize knowledge across locations and specialties virtually, little is known about whether such mobilization of knowledge happens in reality. The objective of this study is to advance our understanding of the effectiveness of an online knowledge community in promoting distance-and specialty-crossing knowledge sharing. To this end, we analyze knowledge sharing patterns in an online knowledge community of a global Fortune 500 consulting company that provides knowledge-intensive services. We find that, despite the global connectivity enabled by the Internet, knowledge is still circulated mostly within a smaller group of employees who are nearby or who have the same specialties in the online knowledge community. This finding indicates that existing knowledge is not efficiently utilized across locations and specialties; thus, companies are missing learning opportunities.

In this study, we focus on the largely overlooked but important topic: social value created by teleconsultations. Many countries suffer from the geographic imbalance of their medical professionals: there are abundant resources in urban cities but too few in rural areas. Teleconsultations have emerged as a promising solution to reduce this disparity because they can remotely deliver healthcare without relocating medical professionals. Yet it is unclear whether teleconsultations actually mobilize healthcare to underserved areas. To answer this question, we collaborate with a large online healthcare platform and analyze its teleconsulting data together with offline healthcare and regional data. Our results indicate that teleconsultations tend to connect physicians in resourceful regions with patients in underserved areas—a desirable pattern that alleviates the geographic healthcare disparity. However, we also find that social, information, and geography frictions persist. For instance, teleconsultations are less likely to occur as regions become farther apart, and financial and information constraints limit rural patients’ access to teleconsultations. We uncover the underlying mechanisms that drive such frictions and provide recommendations to reduce the frictions that hinder teleconsultations.

This study investigates the creative idea generation process in an open innovation platform. The idea generation process is simultaneously influenced by multiple activities: knowledge acquisition from participants’ interactions with each other’s ideas, deliberate practice through persistent participation, and learning through failures. Due to the dynamic interplay across these activities, it is challenging to identify each activity’s influence on creative ideation outcomes using reduced-form regression analysis. To overcome these challenges, we employ a comprehensive empirical framework, the mutually exciting spatiotemporal point process model with unobserved heterogeneity, which endogenizes the occurrences of these activities in continuous time and allows for user-dependent effects. By utilizing the activity stream data of 13,028 participants from 2010 to 2016 in an open innovation platform, we uncovered synergistic effects of these activities on creative outcomes. We find that knowledge acquired through interaction with others (i.e., stimulus ideas) plays a vital role in the creative ideation process, but their effect is more nuanced than what we have known so far. In contrast to the prior belief that distant analogies, stimulus ideas outside of a problem domain, spur creativity, we find that distant analogies lead to failures. Yet, we further find that such failures are indispensable to the creative ideation process because failures motivate idea generators (1) to acquire more knowledge by increasing their future interactions with other participants’ ideas (learning from others), and (2) to persist in generating ideas that lead to improvements in their ability to apply the acquired knowledge and to identify innovation tasks that are relevant to their stock of acquired knowledge (learning by doing). Our results indicate that failures are a stronger driver of the learning activities than successes. Based on our findings, we offer insights on how to cultivate creativity in an open innovation setting.