Network Social Capital On The Impact Of The Virtual Community Knowledge Sharing And Innovative Research

Due to the bloom of Internet, virtual communities have become more and more important in people's life. They continually enrich and change the relationship between people and take a mass of information and service to them because of their unique characters. Virtual communities of interactivity are the main communities in China for participators to accumulate useful resources by interaction ties, trust and norm in purpose of cooperation such as knowledge sharing. The sum of resources is called social capital in traditional communities. In this paper, we take virtual communities of interactivity as our study object.This study integrates the social capital theory, knowledge sharing and the innovation performance concept to construct a theoretical model and defines the 'Internet social capital' and 'innovation performance in virtual communities'.The aim of this paper is to find how internet social capital influences the knowledge sharing and the innovation performance, focusing on three dimensions of internet social capital that include 7 factors: interaction ties, equivalence, trust, reciprocity, identification, shared language and shared vision. Through quantitative analysis, the main conclusions are as follows:(1) Interaction ties, reciprocity, trust, shared language and equivalence have significant effects on the knowledge sharing. The quality and quantity of knowledge sharing has significant effects on the innovation performance of virtual communities.(2) Without considering the effect of knowledge sharing, interaction ties, trust and equivalence have significant effect on innovation performance but identification, shared language and shared vision have no significant effect which differs from the situation in traditional communities.(3) The mediate effect of knowledge sharing between internet social capital and innovation performance exists but is not always significant.(4) The types of virtual communities of interacitivity play an important role in knowledge sharing and innovation performance.These research conclusions help people understand the influence mechanism of internet social capital on knowledge sharing and innovation performance, and give useful suggestions for developing successful virtual communities.