George Por about community straddlers and innovation (better read the whole post)
…for radical innovation to fly, KM, innovation management, and R&D, they all need to perform foreground/background shift in their thinking about communities of practice. Picture the CPs of your organization as a parallel structure, a network of nodes with strong or weak links or no links between them, Corporate CP-support teams are typically focused in helping individual CPs getting off the ground or unstuck, or providing ongoing facilitation in some cases. For enabling CPs to foster radical innovation somebody has to focus not on the nodes but the links between them. That somebody has also to perceive and assess how well the pattern of those links is aligned with the organization’s innovation strategy.
Who can be that “somebody”? Anyone who cares enough about the organization to dramatically increase its value to all stakeholders, its customers and members alike. The more, the merrier.
I know, what I’m saying in this blog entry is easier said than done. I do hope raising more questions than answering. I believe this is a ground-breaking inquiry, and would welcome your comments and questions to further it together. So, if you feel an urge to jump in, don’t restrain yourself J , don’t hesitate to click on the “Comment” link below. If you have authoring access to this blog, post a new entry and select “Innovating with CPs” for one of the categories, under which you list it.
There’s more background to my thinking about “radical innovation with CPs” in my whitepaper of the same title.For me George contributes to answering not an easy question from practice “how can we support a community of practice in moving from problem-solving to innovation”. The question is not correct: this is not about a community, this is about an ecosystem of communities.
Tags: communities, community straddling, innovationArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/04/16.html#a558; comments are here.
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