Development of a Peer-Creation-Process to Leverage the Power of Collaborative Knowledge Transfer

Abstract

The effective transfer of existing knowledge among employees becomes increasingly important for organizations in order to remain competitive on the market. Even though the digital age allows for new ways of team collaboration, there are still unsolved problems in terms of knowledge transfer. Thus, knowledge activities as well as aspects of tool support need to be analyzed. Hence, we develop a peer-creation-process (PCP) that provokes know-ledge transfer in several ways. There is a transfer of knowledge from experts to novices and among the experts, resulting in a high-quality knowledge document. We ground our research on insights from collaborative learning and collaboration engineering to develop and evaluate the PCP. We contribute to theory and practice by providing a theory for design and action, with the PCP design leveraging the power of knowledge transfer. We illustrate that our PCP is applicable with, and without, IT-support and give differentiated implications.

Keywords: collaboration engineering, facilitation process model, collaborative learning, peer creation, knowledge transfer, knowledge documentation, intern agenda