Born to be Wild: Using Communities of Practice as a Tool for Knowledge Management

This paper looks at what happens when Communities of Practice are used as a tool for Knowledge Management. The original concept of a Community of Practice appears to have very little in common with the knowledge sharing communities found in Knowledge Management, which are based on a revised view of 'cultivated' communities. We examine the risks and benefits of cultivating Communities of Practice rather than leaving them 'in the wild'. The paper presents the findings from two years of research in a small microelectronics firm to provide some insights into the wild vs domesticated dichotomy and discusses the implications of attempting to tame Communities of Practice in this way.Comment: Paper presented at the Ethicomp 2010: The 'Backwards, Forwards and Sideways' changes of ICT, Tarragona, Spain, April, 2010, pp. 71 - 80

The Role of Rhetoric in the Creation of Strategic Coherence

CEOs of major firms spend a significant amount of their time communicating and presenting their strategy to stakeholders. The power of the leaders may gain legitimacy from this communication but their it legitimacy may also be eroded as the multiplication multiplicity of announcements may cause prejudice to the can damage overall strategic coherence. This problem of ensuring the coherence of thein strategic discourse exists both inside the organization (Mantere and Sillince, 2007) and towards the its multiple outside strategic stakeholders, among them the financial markets. We study the case of the Lafarge Group and the communications of the former CEO, Bertrand Collomb about his strategic plan. We argue in this paper that the coherence in strategic discourses is created through the practice of rhetoric. Specifically, we identify the concrete dynamics by which a « manager as rhetor » creates a coherence at three levels : inside the firm, between the different stakeholders, and temporarily .Strategy, discourse, rhetoric, coherence

Born to be Wild: Using Communities of Practice as a Tool for Knowledge Management

This paper looks at what happens when Communities of Practice are used as a tool for Knowledge Management. The original concept of a Community of Practice appears to have very little in common with the knowledge sharing communities found in Knowledge Management, which are based on a revised view of 'cultivated' communities. We examine the risks and benefits of cultivating Communities of Practice rather than leaving them 'in the wild'. The paper presents the findings from two years of research in a small microelectronics firm to provide some insights into the wild vs domesticated dichotomy and discusses the implications of attempting to tame Communities of Practice in this way.Communities of Practice, Knowledge Management

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing : the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large – network of people in the form of an open call.” Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of the company. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration with no other objectives than to help this company to design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present the three main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) elaboration of Crowdspirit business model; (2) value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3)Theoretical framework on business models based on crowdsourcing. In the conclusion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during this work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

Integrated Scenario-based Design Methodology for Collaborative Technology Innovation

The paper presents a scenario-based methodology developed and tested throughout cooperative research and development projects. It is aimed at supporting information technology innovation with an end-to-end Human and Social Sciences assistance. This methodology provides an integrated approach combining a vision of the potential users, business aspects and technological challenges throughout the design process. An original combination of different methods is proposed and experimented: user-centred design, scenario-based design, user and functional requirements analysis, business value analysis, user acceptance studies, and visualization methods. This methodology has been implemented in three European R&D projects, in the domain of the telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. The key contributions of this approach are that it unifies brings together visions of the users, potential business value and technology challenges thanks to scenario construction.Scenario-based design ; user requirements ; business economics ; functional requirements ; visualization

Crowdsourcing as a way to access external knowledge for innovation

This paper focuses on “crowdsourcing” as a significant trend in the new paradigm of open innovation (Chesbrough 2006; Chesbrough & Appleyard 2007). Crowdsourcing conveys the idea of opening the R&D processes to “the crowd” through a web 2.0 infrastructure. Based on two cases studies of crowdsourcing webstartups (Wilogo and CrowdSpirit), the paper aims to build a framework to characterize and interpret the tension between value creation by a community and value capture by a private economic actor. Contributing to the discussions on “hybrid organizational forms” in organizational studies (Bruce & Jordan 2007), the analysis examines how theses new models combine various forms of relationships and exchanges (market or non market). It describes how crowdsourcing conveys new patterns of control, incentives and co-ordination mechanisms.communauté ; crowdsourcing ; innovation ; formes organisationnelles hybrides ; plateforme ; web 2.0

How to explore new business models for technological innovations

Technological innovation projects must be accompanied by upstream strategic analysis on the related value creation model. It can be shown that generally successful technological innovations have also involved business model innovation. Exploration of new business models is however particularly difficult where there is a rupture in technology due to a lack of vision of the markets and applications to target. This article proposes a scenario-based method for exploring business models for technological innovation. The method includes overview questions on the businessmodels completed by specific questions relating the developed technology. This is followed by the definition of business model scenarios based on use scenarios in various application areas of the technology considered. The development of scenarios involves the creation of contrasting butcoherent business models and varying the elements of the retained business models (types of client, value proposition, economical logic, organisation of the value network, technological and marketing criteria specific to the technology). The method was developed to accompany a radical technological innovation in the telecommunications sector, as part of a European project. The article presents the technology under development and the way in which the authors defined the business model questionnaire and how they developed the various scenarios from uses of the technology. The approach opens both theoretical and managerial perspectives: it allows the notion of business model to be made operational by linking it to the technological innovation on one hand and its use on the other. The method should then be extended, by creating storyboards from strategic scenarios, in order to enable the project stakeholders to evaluate them.technological innovation, business model, method, scenarios

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing: the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large - network of people in the form of an open call.”Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of a start-up: Crowdspirit. The company's concept is based on the outsourcing of the entire R&D process to a community of designers and users, in the domain of consumer electronics. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration mainly to help the company design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present four main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) The emergence of the Crowdspirit business model; (2) The value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3) The challenging of the company's initial business model and (4) The creation of a new business model successively open and closed models. In the discussion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during the work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

La rhétorique de la stratégie : comment le dirigeant crée-t-il un ordre pour l'action

National audienceAbstractStrategy communication is a central part of leaders' strategy practice. Recent research onstrategic discourse suggests that this practice can lead to the creation of an order for action.However, this work does not study how managers concretely proceed. To study this practice,we propose to adopt a rhetoric perspective, in order to understand the argumentationmechanisms and their effects in different speech contexts. Our research analyses the case ofthe CEO of the Lafarge Group and how he talks to different stakeholders (senior managers,members of the Board, investors). Our results contribute to precise the role of strategyrhetoric in the enactment of a strategic order, and bring original insights to the “strategy aspractice” research stream.La communication de la stratégie occupe une place centrale dans la pratique des dirigeants.Les recherches récentes sur les discours stratégiques nous suggèrent que cette pratique peutcontribuer à la création d'un ordre pour l'action. Cependant, ces travaux étudient peu la façondont les dirigeants procèdent concrètement. Pour étudier cette pratique, l'article propose uneanalyse par la rhétorique afin de comprendre les ressorts de l'argumentation et leurs effetsdans différents contextes de prise de parole. Notre recherche analyse le cas de lacommunication du dirigeant du Groupe Lafarge auprès des parties prenantes stratégiquesauxquelles il s'adresse (cadres, administrateurs, investisseurs). Nos résultats précisent le rôlede la rhétorique de la stratégie dans la création d'un ordre et apportent un éclairage original aucourant de la stratégie comme pratique

Comment concilier innovation d'exploitation et innovation d'exploration : une étude de cas dans le secteur automobile.

National audienceUne entreprise évoluant dans un environnement fortement concurrentiel doit développer sa capacité à combiner deux types d'innovation : une innovation d'exploitation, basée sur l'efficience du management par projet, et une innovation d'exploration, basée sur le renouvellement et la création de nouvelles compétences. Nous proposons d'assimiler cette capacité à une capacité dynamique d'innovation avant de nous interroger sur les formes organisationnelles favorables à sa mise en œuvre, en nous appuyant notamment sur la notion de structure hybride. L'analyse de la réorganisation de l'innovation dans une entreprise du secteur automobile nous permet d'illustrer les principaux problèmes posés et d'avancer des propositions d'ordre organisationnel et managérial liées à la mise en place d'une structure hybride d'innovation