Suchul Lee

Measuring the risk of knowledge drain in communities of practice

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to develop a metric that quantitatively measures the risk of knowledge drain associated with the departure of a member in communities of practice (CoP). Design/methodology/approach – This paper considers two possible cases in which departure of a member has a high risk of causing knowledge drain: when the member is a network leader, and when the member is an isolated expert. Network analysis is used to identify network influence of each member. The proposed metric is designed considering network influence and knowledge level of individual members, and applied to a case study using real-world data from an online CoP. Findings – This paper demonstrates that the proposed metric properly provides information about the members whose departure could cause serious damage to the CoP because of their strong influence or their inactivity in the network. The metric enables practitioners to identify critical members, and to enact precautions to reduce the vulnerability of the CoP. O...

A comparative analysis of the change in R&D efficiency: a case of R&D leaders in the technology industry

ABSTRACT This paper measures the cumulative change in research and development (R&D) efficiency of globally leading R&D companies in the technology industry. We use Data Envelopment Analysis /Malmquist index to analyse 49 such companies. The change in R&D efficiency is analysed by decomposing the Malmquist index into ‘catch-up’ and ‘frontier shift’ indices, and by comparing cumulative indices to those at the starting period. Those cumulative indices are obtained at both a firm and an industry level. Results indicate that the overall R&D efficiency of these globally leading R&D companies declined slightly during the period 2007–2013. At a firm level, this study determines in detail how the trend of each firm in R&D activities differs from other companies.

Structural health assessment of communities of practice (CoPs)

Purpose – This paper aims to provide organizational knowledge management teams with a new metric, the bottleneck impact score (BIS), a valuable tool for evaluating the structural health of communities of practice (CoPs), by detecting the seriousness and pervasiveness of the bottlenecks occurring in knowledge-sharing activities among CoP members. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the social network analysis method to analyze the activities of organizational members in CoPs and classify organizational members into four types based on their degree of involvement in knowledge creation and consumption. CoPs are also categorized into four types based on the proportion of member types they contain to identify the characteristics of CoP member types and of CoP types. Findings – Data analysis of the knowledge-sharing activities of 4,414 members from 59 CoPs within one of the largest steel manufacturing companies finds that few CoPs are active in both knowledge creating and consuming and that most CoPs ...

Membership Reconfiguration in Knowledge Sharing Network: A Simulation Study

The purpose of this study is to propose a new approach that minimizes the negative impacts of structural barriers to knowledge sharing in the current of knowledge sharing networks by dynamically reconfiguring communities of practice (CoP) memberships. For this purpose, we develop several propositions to determine source CoPs, destination CoPs, rearrangement candidates, and recipient candidates to regulate the process of reconfiguring collaboration networks of source CoPs and reconstructing networks of destination CoPs after reallocating members from source CoPs to destination CoPs. To test the validity and usefulness of the proposed approach, we simulate two reconfiguration strategies that are different in the sense whether or not the distribution of expertise levels of CoP members is considered to determine the destination CoP. Our experimental results confirm that the proposed approach with either strategy effectively decreases potential threats to collaboration among CoP members and improves the structural healthiness of knowledge sharing networks of departments and organization. In particular, the number of CoPs in which knowledge creating is more active than knowledge sharing is significantly increased while the number of inactive CoPs is decreased. We attribute this finding to the fact that both experts and non-experts members are more evenly distributed across CoPs through rearrangement and these experts with light collaboration burden post their knowledge and practical skills to help non-experts in their CoPs.