Developing collective knowledge in geographically distributed teams

Virtual teams have been increasingly cited as an efficient and flexible novel form of organisational arrangements affected by the emergence of the electronic business space. The purpose of forming such teams is new "knowledge creation". The focus of this paper, therefore, is the process of collective "knowing", resulting in novel combinations of products and services. The paper presents the preliminary results of a qualitative research study on seven virtual partnerships and proposes an initial conceptual model of the knowledge creative processes taking place in virtual business relationships.