Communities of practice, knowledge acquisition and innovation: a case study of science-based SMEs

Abstract

Purpose -Recent research into communities of practice (CoPs) has focused on large organizations, suggesting they can be constructed for the purposes of knowledge acquisition and innovation. The study provides evidence that for small science-based firms CoPs are more likely to emerge unplanned to support incremental innovation in the form of problem solving activities.Design/methodology/approach -Thematic template analysis was used to analyze 25 indepth interviews conducted with a range of employees in science-based SMEs.Findings -Analysis of the interview data from a case study of six science-based SMEs provides evidence that both intra and inter-organizational CoPs were leveraged for a variety of purposes, including the acquisition of knowledge and improving firm's ability to generate innovative solutions. Research limitations/implications -Whilst there cannot be any claim of 'representativeness'of the sample in relation to the wider population of science-based firms, the authors do maintain that the new empirical material has made a contribution to a research area which has been dominated, especially in recent years, by a focus upon large organizations that have adopted a managerialist orientation.Practical implications -a contextualized framework for the construction of CoPs in sciencebased SMEs has been developed from the findings of this study.Originality/value -The challenges of understanding the role of CoPs in science-based SMEs and the factors that influence their success, or otherwise, have not been sufficiently investigated and have received little attention in the extant literature. Hence, this paper makes an original contribution to this body of knowledge.

Developing international social capital: The role of communities of practice and clustering

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Knowledge Processes, Absorptive Capacity and Innovation: A Mediation Analysis

“…External knowledge search and acquisition represents an important process for every organization, especially when internal resources are scarce and innovation is an imperative (Maes and Sels, ). Several papers investigate the relationship between knowledge acquisition and innovation (e.g., Zhou and Li, ; Pattinson and Preece, ; Segarra‐Cipres et al, ), concluding that the acquisition of external knowledge promotes different innovation types such as administrative and technical innovation (Chen and Huang, ), product/service innovation (Marvel, ), product innovation (Maurer, ), and new product performance (Molina‐Morales et al, ). Thus, the authors formulate the following hypothesis:H1a Knowledge acquisition positively impacts on organizational innovation.…”

A Cross-organizational Ecology for Virtual Communities of Practice in Higher Education

“…This study builds on the existing body of research that has looked at the positive role of CoPs in social learning and knowledge networks (McLoughlin, Patel, O'Callaghan, & Reeves, 2018;Tseng & Kuo, 2014), driving innovative thinking (Stone et al, 2017) and assisting in professional development (P. Brown, 2015;Khalid & Strange, 2016) in both educational (deChambeau, 2017) and industrial settings (Hafeez, Alghatas, Foroudi, Nguyen, & Gupta, 2019;Huang & Perng, 2017;Pattinson & Preece, 2014).…”