Innovation through virtual communities of practice: motivations and constraints in the knowledge-creation process

This paper appears in International Journal of Projectics. Vol 4(1), pp. 39-49

Communities of Practice(CoP) are places which provide a sound basis for organizational learning, enabling knowledge creation and acquisition,thereby improving organizational performance, leveraging innovation and consequently increasing competitiveness. Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP) can perform a central role in promoting communication and collaboration between members who are dispersed in both time and space. The ongoing case study, described here, aims to identify both the motivations and the constraints that members of an organization experience when taking part in the knowledge creating and sharing processes of the VCoP to which they belong. Based on a literature review, we have identified several factors that influence such processes; they are used to analyze the results of interviews carried out in this study of three multinationals.