Summary: In this article, Etienne C. Wenger, a consultant on communities of practice (CoP's) and author of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, and William M. Snyder, one of the founding partners of Social Capital Group, argue that CoP's will move past mere team collaboration and become an organizational form that reinvents companies by galvanizing knowledge sharing, learning, and change. Those who participate in CoP's are informally bound through expertise and passion-whether this be through physically meeting regularly or electronic networks online. While some consider community of practice as a fad, Wenger and Snyder have observed how CoP's have drastically improved organizational performance through driving strategy, starting new lines of business, solving problems quickly, transferring best practices, developing professional skills, and recruiting and retaining talent in large corporations. Wenger and Snyder urge company managers to understand CoP's and how they work, realize that CoP's can be the main source of knowledge development, and appreciate that CoP's are informal organizational structures that need to be integrated into businesses in order to achieve their full potential for organizational improvement.
This was a great article on Communities of Practice. This week, I have really enjoyed understanding more clearly exactly what that means. I really liked the simplicity of Wenger's definition. "they're groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise." This week, I have really focused on communities of Practice as it connects to online classrooms but as this article states, I'm realizing this connects to so much more including businesses or other organizations. Insightful Article!
Summary: In this article, Etienne C. Wenger, a consultant on communities of practice (CoP's) and author of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, and William M. Snyder, one of the founding partners of Social Capital Group, argue that CoP's will move past mere team collaboration and become an organizational form that reinvents companies by galvanizing knowledge sharing, learning, and change. Those who participate in CoP's are informally bound through expertise and passion-whether this be through physically meeting regularly or electronic networks online. While some consider community of practice as a fad, Wenger and Snyder have observed how CoP's have drastically improved organizational performance through driving strategy, starting new lines of business, solving problems quickly, transferring best practices, developing professional skills, and recruiting and retaining talent in large corporations. Wenger and Snyder urge company managers to understand CoP's and how they work, realize that CoP's can be the main source of knowledge development, and appreciate that CoP's are informal organizational structures that need to be integrated into businesses in order to achieve their full potential for organizational improvement.
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