Nurturing and Leveraging Virtual Communities: A Two-Dimensional Process Model

Despite the optimism surrounding the business potential of virtual communities (VCs), our knowledge of how VCs can be nurtured and leveraged to create value for the organizations that sponsor them is limited. To address this knowledge gap, a twodimensional process model of the development and leverage of a VC is inductively derived from a case study of one of the most commercially successful VCs in Singapore. The model suggests that different IT competencies drive the development of various VCenabled capabilities in different stages of VC maturity. Moreover, as the VC becomes increasingly mature, the number of ways in which it can be leveraged for organizational value creation increases. With its findings, this study sheds light on the key mechanisms of VC-enabled organizational value creation, and provides a comprehensive and empirically grounded framework for practitioners to analyze and optimize their investments in VCs.