Knowledge sharing in dynamic virtual enterprises: A socio-technological perspective

The success of a virtual enterprise depends largely on the effective collaboration of its members in orchestrating their knowledge, skills, core competences and resources, in order to enhance competitive capabilities and respond better to business opportunities. In this paper we address the challenges of knowledge sharing in dynamic virtual enterprises. We take a socio-technological approach by proposing a human-centered knowledge sharing solution and architecture. Specifically, we propose a knowledge resource space model to represent heterogeneous knowledge resources, both explicit and implicit. We then introduce a knowledge sharing community model and adopt an agent based solution to perform the functions of knowledge sharing among members of a dynamic virtual enterprise. Our solution incorporates the concepts of agent society and semantic ontology. Knowledge sharing in dynamic virtual enterprises is performed with three types of ties: knowledge agent to knowledge agent, knowledge agent to knowledge item, and knowledge item to knowledge item. We measure agent-to-agent ties by preference correlation using the contribution degree of one agent to another and the preference similarity degree between two agents. We define a semantic view to show agent-to-item ties and use semantic links in the knowledge resource space model to reflect item-to-item ties. We also elaborate the co-evolution mechanism of collective intelligence across enterprises throughout the lifecycle of a dynamic virtual enterprise. A case study is presented to validate our approach.