Combining Open Innovation and Knowledge Management for a Community of Practice - An Analytics Driven Approach

Communities connecting people who want to create and share knowledge and participate in the development of new products and services related to emerging technologies gain increasingly attention. Such communities of practices benefit from components that allow innovation activities for the community members. Also, the shared creation of a knowledge base can contribute to community success. So far, these two components have been addressed separately. In our research, we integrate them by means of an analytics component. It can foster the processes within a community and provide novel insights about the domain in focus, such as by observing the community members behavior, as these members represent relevant stakeholders for the domain. We conceptualize a framework for integrating the components open innovation, knowledge management, community management, and analytics. In a multi-year research project we have implemented and evaluated the framework. The paper at hand presents preliminary findings.