Equipment-Related Knowledge Creation in Innovative Online Basketball Communities
Johann Füller, Gregor Jawecki, Hans Mühlbacher · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2006
This chapter investigates how knowledge related to basketball equipment emerges and spreads within online basketball communities. Our netnographic research shows that within online basketball communities commonly shared knowledge arises through shoptalk of members’ product usage experiences, basketball-related know-how and opinions. Knowledge-sharing is not only supported by vivid stories but also by uploaded pictures and drawings to which community members are referring. Valuable discussions are archived and can be easily found and accessed by every community member. New knowledge emerges within online basketball communities by members’ jointly working on problems or tasks self-stated by individual, well-respected community members in the form of ‘friendly’ competitions. While many community members provide their product judgement and engage in discussions on how to improve the user-generated designs, only a small number of community members possess sufficient creativity, domain-specific skills and motivation to develop new basketball shoes. The high quality and variety of community members’ knowledge seems to be a promising source of innovation. In addition, various examples indicate community members’ positive predisposition to share their know-how and ideas with producers. This leads to discussing how creative communities can be virtually integrated into a company’s innovation process. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.