V2C-apparatus – a professional community of practice for knowledge transfer
Jussi Okkonen, Senior Researcher
Tampere University of Technology, Institute of Business Information Management
PO Box 541
FIN-33101 Tampere
Finland
The role of venture capital finance is significant when ideas, or ventures, are developed to new companies. To make ventures and venture capital meet there is also niche for venture-to-capital (V2C) operative. The network of mutual and organisational relationships consisting of (i) entrepreneurs or venturers, (ii) V2C operatives or venture knowledgists, and (iii) venture capital operatives or venture capitalists form an activity system based on social capital and mutual trust. These three groups are the key stakeholders of the growth company process. Ventures, venturers and knowledgist form a community of practice that is based on notion of mutual benefit from working together. Such community can be formal or informal, in any case it is based on trust and social capital
At least partial role of V2C is to enable learning, i.e. transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge. The activity theory approach emphasises such process based on interaction. Moreover, most operatives in V2C are professionals in their fields, thus there is presupposed leverage effect if the activity system is functional. In the context of the growth company process, social capital should be taken in account as the sum of mutual acquaintance and recognition or network of social exchanges between operatives or the actors engaging in transactions. Moreover the three dimensions of social capital affecting any actor in that process are (i) structural, i.e. presence or absence of interaction, (ii) dimensional, i.e. mutual trust and trustworthiness, and (iii) cognitive, i.e. shared understanding of common goals and proper ways to act.
The aim of this paper is to elaborate theory of V2C by introducing activity theory in V2C context and by approaching V2C-apparatus as a knowledge transferring community of practice. The empirical data consists of interviews and participant observation of different operatives or actors in V2C-process in Finland and Russia. Along the conceptual analysis, the problem approached by describing the knowledge transfer process, analysing different types of knowledge transferred in the process, and finally analysing the described activity system as a professional community of practice.