Assistant Professor Lars Bach, ICOA/ School of Culture and Society - Centre for Interacting Minds (IMC), Arts

Professor Dorthe Døjbak Haakonsson, ICOA/ Department of Business Development and Technology, BSS

Professor Børge Obel, ICOA MGMT, BSS

Professor Charles Snow, Professor Emeritus, Penn State/Visiting scholar ICOA

Abstract:

We analyze how member composition influences the temporal development of collaborative communities with diverse types of members. By help of a simulation study, we examine the impact of member specialization and skill level of current, and new members of the community. Our simulation model represents an actual collaborative community with two types of members: Academics and practitioners. The simulation results show an initial convergence of the member types such that a drop-out of the abundant member type (academics in ODC’s case) will cause the two membership types to exist in approximately equal proportions.

We also find that communities, regardless of their individual distribution of member specialization, experience a critical phase of diminished community size resulting from mismatch of members due to differences skill and skill-requirements. Further, our results show that sustainable collaborative communities are those that already at the outset have high specialization. On the other hand low specialization at the outset may allow academics to track -by selective replacement- a subpopulation of specialized practitioners with relatively hard problems.