Challenge in Sharing Tacit Knowledge: Academicians’ Behavior towards Developing a Web Portal for Sharing Research Ideas

Academicians’ collective memories soft information, such as research ideas, expertise, experiences, academic skills, know-what, know-how and know-why which inevitability it is considered should made accessible. The Higher Education Institution needs to identify, collect, classify, verbalize and diffuse the academicians’ soft information specifically research ideas present in the university for knowledge enrichment. This can be implemented by the academicians actively sharing their research ideas with others. Actively sharing research ideas by academicians will have great impact on the enrichment of their intellectual capability as most of the valuable knowledge resides in one’s brain. However, as there is no specific medium to bring their research ideas into the surface and be visible to others, the precious research ideas still remain in the academicians’ brains. Therefore, the objective of the study is to explore academicians’ behavior toward the development of a sharing research ideas web portal at private university colleges in Malaysia. This study used the qualitative method that is a multiple cases study. The study refers to four private university colleges in Malaysia. In-depth interview, focus group discussion and document analysis were formed the data collection for this study. The theory of Planned Behavior by Ajzen (1991) was used to determine academicians’ behavior. This study showed that the academicians’ attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control towards developing a web portal for sharing research ideas all affect their intention to share their research ideas with others.