Continuous Knowledge Sharing: An Exploratory Study Using Online Focus Group Technique

In recent years, online communities have become a popular social space for consumers to interact with each other from around the world. Generally within online community, people with different level of experience and expertise can informally share what they know. In order to ensure online community sustainability, it requires continuous knowledge sharing from its members. Based on the literature, very little is known about continuous knowledge sharing. Hence, this study fills the gap by employing a qualitative research that is aim to explore why community members continuously share knowledge within business online communities. Online focus group is selected as data collection technique. Based on the results continuous knowledge sharing is explained by three main beliefs motivation, technology and social. This paper ends by a discussion on the contributions of this research.