Leveraging Lead User Knowledge in Software Development—The Case of Weblog Technology

Firms increasingly rely upon information technology (IT) to manage organizational knowledge, though this does not inevitably result in increased knowledge sharing. In contrast, we know that in the case of non-commercial open software development, IT plays a central role in knowledge sharing between software developers. This paper acknowledges the impact of a blogosphere—a system of connected weblogs (i.e. personalized and informal publications on the Internet in reverse chronological order)—on the motivation of lead users to develop commercial software together with the employees of a large for-profit organization. On the basis of multi-method data, collected over a 28-month period, our results indicate parallels to the field of open source software: we argue that weblog technology and its features evoke intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to engage in knowledge sharing within a commercial software development project.