Strategic Online Communities: How Online Communities Facilitate Business Strategies to Enhance Organizational Performance

Despite the optimism surrounding the business value of online communities (OCs), our knowledge of how OCs can be leveraged strategically to enhance the performance of the sponsoring organization is limited. To address this lack of knowledge, a theoretical lens is constructed by distilling the essence of strategic management literature into three logics of strategy that prescribe different means of improving organization performance. Applying this theoretical lens to analyze a case study of the most commercially successful OC in Singapore, a process model is inductively derived that depicts the various ways through which a OC can bring about better organizational performance under different contextual conditions. With the findings, this study contributes to the existing knowledge on the strategic implications of OCs, demonstrates the compatibility of the logics of strategy in specific conditions, and provides a framework for practitioners to analyze their investments in OCs.