The Roles of Peripheral Participants and Brokers

The objective of our chapter is to gain a better understanding of learning trajectories connecting external and internal communities of practices. To do so we studied four internal communities of practice by actors belonging to a same external community. We realized semi-directive interviews in these communities supplemented by direct observation of meetings. Our results give a new perspective on participation to communities of practice. We describe how young members act as boundary spanners between the communities and the practice in their organization while more senior members act as unique facilitators with a balance between boundary spanning and buffering. We describe in detail the personal characteristics of these senior members.

Triple Helix Organisations, Communities of Practice and Time

Commercialisation activities require knowledge sharing between groups such as researchers and commercial managers. The existence of research based Knowledge-stewarding Communities of Practice (CoPs) within industry/research/government innovation collaborations has important implications for innovation management practice. The context of the study is four Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) composed of academic, government and industry personnel. Semi-structured interviews with a total of twenty scientists, engineers and managers explored collectively shared and dissimilar perceptions of time in commercialisation activities. Knowledge-stewarding CoP members and commercial participants in triple helix organisations working to commercialise inventions report differing temporal perceptions. Commercial and research groups described distinctively different views of pace and flexibility, contributing to tension, distrust and negatively influencing knowledge sharing, communication and commercialisation outcomes. Management techniques in use in the four CRCs and an agenda for future research conclude the chapter. This chapter contributes to the literature on collaborative innovation management and inter-organisational CoPs.

Management Fads, Communities of Practice and Innovation

This chapter introduces communities of practice (CoPs) as a useful framework for the elucidation of the innovation process in organizations. It argues that CoPs contribute to innovation through being more efficient than formal organizational structures. Innovation, however, comes in different forms and types and internal CoPs are more relevant for incremental innovation, while inter-organizational communities are more important for radical innovation. Furthermore the chapter focuses on a critical evaluation of the concept of community of practice through the lens of the management fashion theory and an assessment of the role of CoPs in knowledge creation and exchange at the various stages of the innovation process. It aims to provide an assessment of the contribution of communities of practice to innovation success and organizational performance and to summarize the current trends and future developments especially in inter-organizational virtual innovation communities.

People-Focused Knowledge Sharing Initiatives in Medium-High and High Technology Companies

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the organizational conditions that foster the development of different people-focused knowledge sharing initiatives in medium-high and high technology companies, as well as the degree of influence of those initiatives on the ideation stage of innovation processes. Finally, considering that successful innovation is the one that helps to improve business competitiveness, the degree of influence of this innovation capability dimension on company performance is examined. For these relationships to be tested, an empirical study has been carried out among medium-high and high technology Spanish manufacturing firms with more than 50 employees and which carry out R&D activities. To this end, a questionnaire has been designed and submitted to the CEOs of the companies making up the target population of the research. Structural equation modelling (SEM) based on partial least squares (PLS) has then been applied in order to test the main hypotheses of the research.

Community and Advantage in the Effects Industry

This study explores the question of how the competitive environment, regional clustering and industry network structure influence the potential for developing firm level competitive advantage based on communities of practice. Paying attention to the context that communities of practice function in is important because only by doing so can we understand the conditions that constrain or facilitate the emergence of competitive advantage from them. Using the motion picture visual effects industry as the basis for a descriptive case, the study relies on primary sources and archival data to examine how managers can move toward competitive advantage by understanding communities of practice and the social, economic and organizational contexts in which they emerge.

Creativity in Action

This chapter explores the concept of communities of practice (CoP), with reference to ethnographic data from a range of creative multi-media SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) in Manchester in the UK. The central argument is that many of these communities are profoundly mediated by the interplay of competitive commercial imperatives with professional obligations and constructions of identity. Hence, the concept of community is a more fragmented and fractured one. Ultimately, CoP is a robust metaphor to analysis organisational life but more descriptive detail of situated lived practices and mundane realities of various work settings is called for. Ethnographic data is drawn on to demonstrate the participant’s accounts of their lived experiences, which include reflections on the process of creativity, collaborative negotiations with clients and organisational learning. Ethnomethodology, a form of sociological analysis, is then used to suggest alternative ways to analyse the situated nature of practice, learning and community.

CoPs & Organizational Identity

The present chapter analyzes the emergent concepts of communities of practice and organizational identity, as well as their interrelationships, in the context of a knowledge-based economy. In particular, the chapter focuses on new technology-based firms (NTBF). Two main propositions are discussed. First, members of these organizations can build the organizational identity through communities of practice. Second, the organizational identity socially built by members can facilitate the emergence of communities of practice. These propositions are first grounded in a theoretical review and later they are tested empirically in five case studies of new technology-based firms created at Madrid Science Park. Finally, the main conclusions and directions for further research are presented.

Communities of Practice Based Business Performance Evaluation

Knowledge Management (KM) is known to enhance an organization’s performance and innovation via the knowledge sharing both explicitly and tacitly. Moreover, Communities of Practice (CoPs) has been accepted as an effective way to retrieve and facilitate tacit knowledge particularly. Performance Evaluation of CoPs will significantly impact an organization’s strategic focus, knowledge transfer, resource allocation, and management performance. Meanwhile, proper measurement and decision making processes are critical for KM and CoPs success. However, the ultimate performance of CoPs implementation is uneasy to measure correctly. This chapter attempts to analyze how to establish a feasible framework to assess CoPs performance to meet organizational demands. This framework contains four dimensions and sixteen criteria built from review of existing literature and experts’ interviews in a large R &D organization. Therefore, this chapter tends to discuss the CoPs and its performance evaluation from a theoretical and practical perspective.

Communities of Practice

Many organizations have developed Communities of Practice and they are one of the most important vehicles of knowledge management in the 21st century. Organizations use Communities of Practice for different purposes, but both, organizations and Communities, are limited by different context factors. Therefore, different goals are achieved with them: sometimes the intended goals and sometimes unintended goals. With this in mind, this chapter focuses on the context factors that influence the development of Communities of Practice. To this end, we review different cases of Communities of Practice within various organizations. Our analysis provides: (a) a reflection on the Context factors in the process of integrating Communities of Practice, (b) an analysis of the impact of these factors on the development of Communities of Practice in different organizations and (c) the conclusions of the study. This study is based on the general idea that Communities of Practice are a valid management tool for organizations. This chapter is therefore based on the study of Communities of Practice from the perspective of organizational management.

Evaluating CoPs in Cancer Surgery

This chapter describes a framework for developing and evaluating Communities of Practice initiated by local healthcare organizations and groups. The framework explores specific features of a CoP in the field of quality improvement and the managerial implications of utilizing traditional forms of medical socialization and cultural transmission. The authors describe their own experiences with a CoP in one of the health regions of Ontario, Canada, and compare them to other conceptual and theoretical approaches in the field. The chapter breaks down the implementation of CoP projects in medicine into manageable steps and presents an evaluation tool that could help develop an adequate evaluation process.