Orchestrating Firm Sponsored Communities of Interest Twenty-Third Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, China 2019 Orchestrating Firm Sponsored Communities of Interest: A Critical Realist Case Study Completed Research Paper Diah Priharsari University of Technology Sydney 15 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007 Diah.Priharsari@student.uts.edu.au Babak Abedin University of Technology Sydney 15 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007 Babak.Abedin@uts.edu.au Emmanuel Mastio University of Technology Sydney 15 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007 Emmanuel.Mastio@uts.edu.au Abstract The growth of social media enables firms to co-create value with customers in online communities. The lack of authority of the sponsoring firm in online communities brings questions on how to orchestrate all members of the online community. The extant literature is unsettled about whether sponsoring online communities by firms are worthwhile, and what shapes value co-creation in these communities. Through a critical realist case study, we examined a firm sponsored community of interest in Indonesia. We found that the sponsoring firm should play roles as a co-creator and as a facilitator and switch between them to navigate a community of interest. This study contributes to current knowledge: (i) we propose three mechanisms in the community of interest and how those can be conditioned by the firm roles when orchestrating communities of interest; (ii) we provide an example of a critical realist case study in the field of information systems. Keywords: critical realism, co-creation, firm online sponsored communities, value co- creation Introduction Firm-sponsored online communities have been described as information systems (IS) initiatives sponsored by a firm to co-create value with their external product or service users (Yan et al. 2018). Firms are increasingly considering these online communities to co-create value with customers in production, innovation, and information dissemination (example: Pee 2016; Svahn et al. 2017). This is because contemporary business environments with open systems and hyper-competition make it difficult for firms to excel at developing new products and services, bring them quickly to the market, and sustain them. While there is a lot of support in extant literature for taking advantage of customer engagements in these communities (Abedin, 2016; Pee 2016; Tavakoli et al. 2017), some scholars argue that simply collecting ideas from firm sponsored online communities is not helpful, and firms need to understand how to deal with ideas and orchestrate various actors involved (Abedin & Babar, 2018; Dong and Wu 2015). Consequently, information systems (IS) scholars are still examining challenges and constraints of these communities for value creation and innovation and what effective strategies firms need to utilize technology to benefit from their potentials (Yan et al. 2018).