Felix Schmitz-Justen

• Knowledge is becoming ever more important as an individual good, and as a social and economic resource. The research interest of this thesis is how knowledge processes can be optimally supported in the cooperative context of forum-based Online Knowledge Communities (OKCs). The research focuses especially on the two key processes knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. The starting point of the research is a literature review and the outline of individual hypotheses on the basis of an interdisciplinary body of research from the fields of computer science and management science, specifically knowledge management literature, community of practice literature, human-computer interaction literature, and collaborative systems literature. Following the literature review, the empirical part of the research is based on an in-depth study of the users of the electronic communication forums at International University Bremen (IUB). Both empirical parts of research - an ANOVA-based calculation of type of content-based knowledge process values and a SEM-based hypotheses testing of individual factors of impact on an individual's knowledge process contribution - could be shown to be in line with the theoretically deduced hypotheses. Besides the careful selection of a forum-platform (factor service quality) and carefully drafting of the initial content in the case of newly established online knowledge communities (factor perceived quality of content), the best strategy to stimulate participants to contribute a larger share of knowledge-process-relevant content appears to be the emphasis of the online forum as an online knowledge community, with a focus on professional as opposed to social content (factors social vs. professional affiliation motivation). The thesis integrates existing, fragmented research with a limited focus on a restricted number of input aspects and/or knowledge processes into an integrated model of forum-based collaborative knowledge management.