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Top1. Introduction
In a knowledge economy, effective knowledge sharing has become more critical than ever in the business world, and the topic of knowledge sharing has attracted the attention of numerous scholars (Al-Azad, Mohiuddin, & Su, 2022; Borodako, Berbeka, & Rudnicki, 2021; Mengesha, Watson, & Negash, 2021; Rahman et al., 2022; Uniyal et al., 2021). Prior studies have considered internal talent cultivation or knowledge-sharing as an essential corporate strategy for improving organizational competitiveness (Hsieh et al., 2019; Li et al., 2022; Ma & Zhang, 2022; Yao et al., 2021). Specifically, they have analyzed how various stakeholders, such as government agencies and business organizations, influence knowledge-sharing processes (Kassen, 2020), explored knowledge transfer and its impact on business models (Bernardi et al., 2021), and investigated the effect of organizational and network resource heterogeneities on knowledge transfer (Dolmark et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2021).
With the rapid development of information and network technology, virtual knowledge has become a critical platform for knowledge transfers or knowledge sharing among employees of enterprises or other organizations (Al-Hasan, Khuntia, & Yim, 2021; Ardichvili et al., 2003; Luo et al., 2021; Qi at al., 2021; Trappey, Chang, & Trappey, 2021; Wang et al., 2022). However, although participants can take non-predetermined roles in the process of value co-creation and contribute to such value co-creation in organizations (Goermar et al., 2021), the full potential of such virtual communities is yet to be realized. Prior studies show that knowledge collaboration is influenced by factors such as participants’ willingness to cooperate and knowledge attributes (Cheng & Chang, 2020). They also find that knowledge is shared more frequently during formal settings than informal settings, suggesting a lack of participant motivation to contribute knowledge in informal settings such as virtual knowledge (Weijs-Perrée et al., 2020). However, not all participants are eager to participate in knowledge internalization or sharing (Wipawayangkool & Teng, 2019). Many virtual knowledge communities fail for the insufficient engagement of participants or collaborators (Haas et al., 2021). Due to the absence of more effective incentive mechanisms, virtual knowledge typically faces low knowledge-sharing efficiency, difficulty in attracting high-quality content, and a lack of user enthusiasm for long-term participation. Hence, refining and developing knowledge-based processes is essential to lead organizations to higher innovation performances (Choi et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2022), which is the focus of our research based on blockchain technology.