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Opinion leaders often play key roles in online knowledge-sharing communities, which has intrigued a lot of researchers and practitioners worldwide. However, it is not clear how various characteristics of opinion leaders may affect different online groups’ knowledge-sharing engagement. This paper aims to answer this question by building upon social capital theory to examine the differential influences of opinion leaders’ characteristics (interactivity, authority, and activity) on online groups. In-groups and out-groups were distinguished, and the study used the context of an investment-oriented online knowledge-sharing community. By leveraging a unique aggregated group-level secondhand dataset collected from Snowball.com, we conducted log-linear and Poisson regression models. The results revealed that the intensity of online group knowledge-sharing engagement was heavily contingent upon the types of characteristics of opinion leaders. We found that in-group knowledge-sharing engagement (generating new knowledge) was driven by an opinion leader’s interactivity and authority, whereas out-group knowledge-sharing engagement (developing new members) could not be facilitated by these types of characteristics. Instead, the opinion leader’s activity hindered out-group users from joining in-groups. The study also identified a “mutual promotion” issue, which was generated from the association between in-group and out-group knowledge-sharing engagement.

Entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly essential in this current era of the knowledge economy. It contributes to the innovation of products and services as well as improved processes. In the long-run, it can also improve the sustainability of the economy by depicting better efficiency and social goals. To stimulate entrepreneurship, it is essential to investigate the thinking behind entrepreneurship or what entrepreneurs think about entrepreneurship. Such investigations should encompass the mental images of entrepreneurs. In this regard, content analysis, based on the popular Zhisland essays, may be applied to elicit opinions from Chinese entrepreneurs about activities, critical factors and intended outcomes within the ambit of entrepreneurship. In this study, 634 concepts are first coded and categorized into 20 second-level themes and six first-level themes. The six first-level themes are competing strategy, human resource management, management and leadership, marketing and sale, research and development, and risk management. Furthermore, among the 20 second-level themes, leadership, self-improvement, and the risk of business cycle attract the highest attention, each of which accounts for around 10% of the coded concepts. Finally, a causal loop diagram is depicted to synthesize the coding results. This study also underscores three essential activities of entrepreneurship, which entail building and maintaining competing advantage, improving user experience, and risk management. Entrepreneurs need to balance investments in those activities according to the change in environment and customers’ needs.