Samenvatting

All organizations collaborate with other organizations, either in a supplier/customer relationship or as business partners. Business partners try to complement each other in a way that allows both to benefit from the collaboration. In order to be able to collaborate, specific information and knowledge needs to be shared between the business partners. Knowledge management systems can be used within these collaborations in order to facilitate this sharing of knowledge.
Organizations need to select which type of knowledge management they are going to use to support the collaboration with their business partners. There are six types of knowledge management systems identified in previous research (Binney, 2001). Which knowledge management type performs well in a specific type of collaboration (Singh & Mitchell, 1996) has not yet been investigated.
This research investigates the relationship between the six knowledge management types, the two most important business partner collaboration types and collaboration success within a software ecosystem (Jansen, Finkelstein, & Brinkkemper, 2009). This contributes to the understanding about knowledge management systems and the relationship between these factors. It gives organizations direction in what type of knowledge management to choose for a specific collaboration.
The research method used is based on the design science research method (Hevner, March, Park, & Ram, 2004). The framework created is based on the results of the literature review and an expert interview. The framework was validated and evaluated by performing another expert interview, an in-depth case study and a quantitative online questionnaire.
The results of the research indicate that the effectiveness of the six types of knowledge management varies between the two collaboration types. This suggests directions for future research. By enlarging the research response in terms of participants and software ecosystems, the validation of the effectiveness of the knowledge management types found can be further investigated in other settings.