Economic Issues of Online Professional Communities

The term online professional community (OPC) is employed here to identify groups of professionals sharing information and knowledge for business purposes by means of Internet-based technologies (see also Plant, 2004). It is not our aim to thoroughly discuss the concept of community, but since this term may be used with various shades of meaning, it is thus convenient to indicate more precisely where our definition can be placed in the broader picture (Figure 1). This will be made by discussing two important dimensions that are relevant here.