The Book: “Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage”

This book, written by two of our principals, is lauded as a “best-of-breed primer for people who want to get results from communities of practice”... Today, an enterprise's intangible assets are key to its ability to create a competitive advantage and to grow at an accelerated pace. As a result, organizations are implementing initiatives that create value through leveraging knowledge. One approach is to encourage the development of communities of practice within the organization as a vehicle for increasing intellectual capital through knowledge creation and sharing. By acknowledging the value of communities (e.g., recognition of membership contribution, support for time commitment) and providing communities with an infrastructure (e.g., communication platform, facilitation, information resources), organizations can increase the speed at which communities innovate, extend the reach of the community's knowledge sharing, and provide an opportunity to make the community's knowledge persistent. www.knowinc.com/cop-book/index.html

The CoP Toolkit

www.coptoolkit.com

This Toolkit, based on the book "Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage," is a hands-on operational guide that helps organizations develop their own communities of practice. While the book unveils how an organization can approach the creation and support of communities of practice (through the real life example of Clarica Life Insurance Company), the Toolkit acts as an interactive platform that supports the theory and framework outlined. It provides a step-by-step community development approach that can be adapted to the specific needs and environment of your organization. Rich media video clips deliver a rich learning experience. The French version of this Toolkit will be available in the second quarter 2004.

4. Introduce CoPs to Your Organization through a Workshop

Deb Wallace: Workshop Leader, Communities of Practice

As co-author of the book “Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage” (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003) Debra Wallace is a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator. Dr. Wallace consults in a wide range of private and public sector organizations, helping them to develop knowledge and learning strategies to maximize their performance. Most recently, she was responsible for developing and guiding the implementation of the organization-wide knowledge and learning strategy for the newly combined Sun Life Financial and Clarica Life Insurance organizations.  In addition to her own book on communities of practice, Dr. Wallace has recently co-authored a chapter on communities of practice in “In Action: Measuring Intellectual Capital” (ASTD, 2002). What is a COP [ Download ppt.] Workshop: Energizing CoPs for Competitive Advantage through Brand Building and Innovation Practice Situation: You have successfully launched several Communities of Practice (CoPs) in your organization. The CoP Toolkit was a great primer for both self-organizing informal CoPs and formally sponsored CoPs. You are now ready to move to the next level i.e. leveraging these communities of practice for strategic advantage. To do this, you want to: empower senior managers to foster innovation in each CoP ; develop in senior managers an “outside in” perspective and mechanisms for sharing this with the CoP membership; energize senior managers to facilitate internal brand-building through their active participation in the CoPs. In this two day workshop, we develop, together with the participating senior managers, a strategy for integrating brand building into the CoPs. Brand Building CoP[ Download pdf.]