What is a Community of Practice?

The term Community of Practice refers to a group of people who share common interests and problems, and who collaborate over an extended period of time.

Established mechanisms for organisational development, they help organisations to develop social capital, stimulate innovation and spread tacit knowledge in order to drive improvements and new innovations.

Through collaborative, interactive networks of individuals, connected within a generally defined topic of knowledge, Communities of Practice arose as a tool to facilitate knowledge sharing in a learning environment (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

Communities of Practice have become a feature of the knowledge
management literature in recent years as their applications to business have received greater attention (Lesser, Fontaine and Slusher, 2000).

Initially, they tended to emerge from voluntary, informal personal workgroups with a specific knowledge. The often cited example (Brown and Duguid, 2000) of Xerox photocopier
technicians discussing problems with colleagues (“war stories”) in the warehouse or over a coffee and receiving information for effective solutions is a classic case of informal, social networking.

Communities of Practice can exist wherever there is a will to share information and experiences in a helpful, like-minded community. Participation in the network is essential and Communities of Practice can yield very positive outcomes.

According to Wenger and Snyder, “people in Communities of Practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems” and these new approaches can yield positive tangible benefits.

Communities of Practice offer a vehicle for knowledge diffusion
(Storck and Hill, 2000) and enable the leveraging of intellectual assets across the firm. Lesser and Storck (2001) identify a number of tangible benefits including “decreasing the learning curve of new employees; responding more rapidly to customer needs and inquiries; reducing rework and preventing ‘reinvention of the wheel; and spawning new ideas for products and services”.

Communities of Practice not only offer a valuable tool for organisations wishing to take advantage of their knowledge and information assets, but are emerging as the most promising structures for building knowledge-based organisations. They
are the key to the knowledge strategy of a growing number of leading companies, government agencies, and non-profits.
Research carried out by IBM Institute for Knowledge-based Organisations and IBM Research, demonstrated the impact that these community investments have on individual performance, organisational performance, overall productivity and, ultimately, the bottom line.