Knowledge exchange platforms, theories, progresses, and applications

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with theories, progresses and applications that arise in online knowledge exchange platforms that are designed to support knowledge creation and sharing and to foster collaboration among users. This research topic has gained an increasing amount of attention globally as knowledge exchange platforms have proven useful in firms' open innovation and agility, helping firms and individuals spot business opportunities, and facilitating the collection, creation, evaluation, storage, accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. However, knowledge exchange platforms tend to fail, and one of the reasons is, after designing and initial development, it is also difficult to sustain users' engagement to supply their knowledge and to do so at a favourable level. In this thesis I am focusing my attention on fixing knowledge exchange problems that are commonly encountered by knowledge exchange platform practitioners and try to find theoretical and practical ways to support people's daily knowledge exchange on these platforms, which have become increasingly important and prevalent in the era of the global knowledge society. I present five specific empirical studies that contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon. The first and second studies try to present a digital nudge design that highlights the importance of immediacy to motivate people contribute better knowledge contributions when they are involved in knowledge exchange activities. besides incentivising contributors to produce good quality knowledge pieces, most public knowledge exchange platforms also need to maximise the knowledge' publicity and ensure that those quality knowledge pieces can be distributed to as many people in need as possible. In this regard, the third study offers an exploratory case analysis of Australia's largest open knowledge exchange portal and investigates what metadata factors can motivate people to retrieve more open science knowledge and data from the open knowledge exchange portal. Some prior research agrees that using a knowledge exchange platform that adopts market-based mechanisms can increase the optimality of enhancing the effectiveness of knowledge exchange because the market mechanisms can provide opportunities for matching knowledge seekers with sources, promote efficient interactions with diverse knowledge, facilitate the use of existing knowledge, and help find solutions to unsolved problems. The fourth and the fifth studies are based on real-world use case analysis, and via observing two real knowledge markets, this thesis deepens the understanding how knowledge markets work and shows how the market-based mechanism can boost knowledge exchange. Show more