Knowledge Creation: Hidden Driver of Innovation in the Digital Era

The importance of knowledge creation and innovation for organizational success is well established. At the same time, emerging technologies are 'generative' platforms with the capacity to produce unprompted change. At its core, innovation is a process of creating and using new ideas and concepts. As such, innovation may be conceptualized as a special class of knowledge creation. Further, the knowledge creation process is a driver of innovation. The paper develops a model of organizational knowledge creation and innovation to pinpoint the moments in the knowledge creation process where innovation occurs. The utility of the framework is illustrated with data from case studies on knowledge creation in innovative virtual world projects, which in turn reveals a set of strategies for driving knowledge creation and innovation in firms. The research has important implications for IS research on emerging technologies and user-generated and crowd-sourced innovation.