Virtual Worlds as Collaborative Innovation and Knowledge Platform

Abstract

To keep up the pace of innovation organizations need to open the innovation process to all organizational members. Virtual worlds enable a new way to connect globally dispersed employees to jointly contribute to the company's innovation process. To explore the potential and current usage of virtual worlds as collaborative innovation platforms, we conducted a qualitative study at IBM. We interviewed IBM employees belonging to a special work group called "Web 2.0/virtual worlds" in order to gain experience in generating and exchanging knowledge, ideas and insights by virtually collaborating and interacting in SL. Our results show that SL bears the potential to connect organizational members as it provides media richness and facilitates social interaction. However, current virtual worlds still capture some problems. Improvements including platform stability, user interface, or security issues may be necessary to use virtual worlds more effectively and efficiently to improve the company's innovation process.