Natwerk Designs

What can a virtual community of practice add to innovations of firms?

What can virtual communities of practice precisely add to a firms innovativeness? How does this process work?

Public Comments

1. Take a look at Wikipedia, or study the practice of Open Source software to see what the benefits are. For instance, if Wikipedia was run by a company and only developed in-house, how many articles do you think they would have? Similarly, the practice of developing software using the Open Source model has similar advantages. Microsoft know this and it's making them say and do some very silly things. In point of fact, a study was recently completed. The aim was to find out if two minds are really better than one, and to find the logical ceiling of this principle (i.e. would 100 minds have a negative effect?) The results proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that by combining many people's talents, their effectiveness went up exponentially to their number. So, for instance, 10 people working a problem simultaneously might be as effective as 12 people working individually. So, now companies are starting to look at ways of working in synch in a virtual environment. Instead of having several geographical dispersed offices working alone, they can work in tandem. Another advantage is that travel becomes less necessary, and the potential to build multi-discipline teams of any size or configuration is almost inexhaustible. One example of this is to have a team of programmers in California who work a day shift. They then meet virtually with the team in India, who then work during the night.