Cross-Organization Virtual CoP: A Field Study in an Information-Based Industry

Boundary Spanning Cop And Innovation Management

The present work links with two prominent theoretical concepts, namely communities of practice and innovation in community settings. The former brings to the forefront long-standing debates on what are communities of practice, the intrinsic of their function online, as well as the more recent issue of appropriate information infrastructures or practice-oriented tools. The latter, resurfaces a more recent challenge approached mainly my management scholars interested in the fabrics of knowledge management and user-driven innovation in community settings. Our interest in these two concepts, as summarized and detailed in this section, is motivated by recent research and development activities focused on the study of distributed collective practices in virtual cross-organization communities of practice. We will therefore attempt a brief but representative review of related literature to set the focus of our current research and motivate the subsequent discussion on innovative information-based product development in cross-organizational virtual communities of practice.