Information and Communication Technologies for Supporting Prosumers Knowledge Sharing – Evidence from Poland and United Kingdom

Abstract

Abstract-InformationConsumers who share their knowledge with enterprises with the aim of creating values and benefits for enterprises and their own consumption are known as "prosumers," whereas the process in which they share knowledge with enterprises is consistent with the notion of "prosumption"[12]- [17]. In general, prosumption refers to situations in which prosumers share knowledge not only with enterprises, but also with other prosumers to produce things of value for enterprises, and also for themselves.Given that advances in ICTs have made it easier to share knowledge and these ICT developments have made the world increasing interconnected, many enterprises recognise there are challenges to employ the appropriate ICTs to facilitate knowledge sharing with prosumers. In considering the complexity of prosumption, prosumers' knowledge sharing initiatives and the variety of ICTs, enterprise must often confront these challenging tasks in deciding what type of ICTs to deploy in support of their prosumption initiatives.The existing studies mostly examine ICTs for knowledge management in enterprises [18]-[23]. Researchers argued that ICTs play an important role in acquiring, codifying, storing, creating, sharing and applying knowledge that can be crucial for effective decision making and control at all levels.The authors of this paper, following an extensive review of the literature, did not uncover any deep studies to interpret how ICTs support prosumers' knowledge sharing with enterprises. This reveals a need to study the ICTs that should be adopted and used by enterprises to better enable prosumers' knowledge sharing. Therefore, conducting research among prosumers and enterprises should contribute to greater understanding of the use of ICTs for prosumers' knowledge sharing and should help fill the gap in the existing body of knowledge.In light of the above limitations, this paper focuses on investigating the choice of ICTs supporting prosumers' knowledge sharing in Poland and the UK. Its aim is to indicate the ICTs that are currently used by prosumers in comparison with the preferred ICTs expected to be used by prosumers.The paper is structured as follows. Section I is an introduction to the subject. Section II states the theoretical background of ICTs for supporting prosumers' knowledge sharing and poses a research question. Section III describes the research methodology. Section IV presents the research findings on ICTs used and expected to be used by prosumers to facilitate knowledge sharing. Section V provides the study's contributions and limitations, and implications for the findings and considerations for future investigative work.