Summary

Online communities (OCs) are emerging as effective spaces for knowledge collaboration and innovation. As a new form of organizing, they offer possibilities for collaboration that extend beyond what is feasible in the traditional hierarchy. OC participants generate new ideas, talk about knowledge, and remix and build on each other’s contributions on a massive scale. OCs are characterized by fluidity in the resources that they draw upon, and they need to manage these tensions in order to sustain knowledge collaboration generatively. OCs sustain knowledge collaboration by facilitating both tacit and explicit knowledge flows. Further, OCs play a key role in supporting and sustaining the knowledge collaboration process that is necessary for open and user innovation. As collective spaces of knowledge flows, OCs are mutually constituted by digital technologies and participants. The future is bright for OC research adopting the knowledge perspective and focusing on how to sustain their knowledge flow.