ifkad articles

Knowledge Sharing Patterns; German No-code Entrepreneurship Online Community’s Encounter

Nicholas George, Farag Edghiem

Entrepreneurs with little or no knowledge of IT infrastructures are establishing innovative digital solutions enterprises while communicating and interacting in no-code online start- up communities. This phenomenon requires additional research not merely on the technical aspects, but the patterns of knowledge sharing, learning, and networking resources accessible within these online communities. This paper will be based on analysing the no-code founding community and user interaction behaviour of their members. No-code founders are an online start-up community network of non-technical entrepreneurs, innovators who are establishing or expanding their ventures utilising no- code technologies. The community members assist each other in developing their no-code competences and business know-how through co-learning. Knowledge is initially acquired via entrepreneurial learning and then communicated to other individuals with whom entrepreneurs interact with, e.g., through online start-up platforms, however not all participants in the network are willing to share their experiences or knowledge (Ratten and Usmanij., 2020). Abbate et al. (2019) suggests that further research can highlight how users are connected to the community to analyse the activities, resources, technology, and services to strategize using an open innovation approach. Flamini et al. (2021) have indicated that open innovation literature requires further research to determine affiliation between entrepreneurs and organisational entities, where an entrepreneur transforms information into knowledge, manages various information and knowledge flows, influences the innovation course through his/her capabilities (Hsieh and Wu, 2019). Therefore, this paper aims to explore the patterns of knowledge sharing within selected United Kingdom and German no-code entrepreneurship communities. UK and German no-code entrepreneurship online communities’ platforms were selected as critical units of analysis and comparative cases which represented the research criteria. The data collection commenced with six semi-structured interviews to explore both no-code communities and the patterns of sharing knowledge between its members. The applied qualitative method helped providing an in-depth investigation leading to capturing the participants’ patterns, experiences, intentions, conceptions when interacting within the studied no-code community. The research findings revealed specific drivers and patterns of sharing knowledge within the studied no-code entrepreneurship online communities; and contribute to addressing the current literature gap and provide fresh insight to management practice and concerned stakeholders to nurture knowledge sharing practices within similar communities.

IN: Proceedings IFKAD 2022 – Knowledge Drivers for Resilience and Transformation
PP: 1387-1409