Virtual Communities for Innovations: Users' Requirements for the Development of an Academic SAP User Group

This Research in Progress paper analyses users' requirements for the development of a Virtual Community (VC) for the academic SAP UCC (University Competence Center) User Group. The SAP UCC User Group consists of lecturers and students using SAP Software for educational purposes. Initially, we are targeting the 1,300 existing lecturers in Germany for this community. The objective of the VC is to improve the communication and cooperation between the lecturers and to support the systematic development of innovations in the field of teaching this Enterprise Resource Planning Software. This paper focuses on the diagnosing phase of the applied action research circle. The goal is, firstly to understand the lecturers' point of view a nd secondly to set the basis for the action planning and realization phase.

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