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"The Center for Open Innovation, a unit of the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization at UC-Berkeley, conducts scholarly research and engages corporate leadership in three key areas: Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation. With knowledge now widely distributed, companies cannot rely entirely on their own research, but should acquire inventions or intellectual property from other companies when it advances the business model. Open Business Models create value by leveraging many more ideas, due to their inclusion of a variety of external concepts, and can also enable greater value capture, by using a key asset, resource, or position not only in the company's own business model but also in other companies' businesses. Services Science, Management and Engineering integrates management, social and cognitive sciences, computer science, operations research, and engineering to drive innovation, competition, and quality of life through service systems."

Anecdote is an Australian consulting firm that specialises in helping organisations to tackle complex problems like organisational change, learning and project evaluation. We help to create the conditions for insight and empowerment. Anecdote can help organisations when traditional methods have failed. Better still, we can help you to avoid failure. We use a range of contemporary but proven approaches that draw on group intelligence, participation, complexity thinking and the power of narrative. We believe that everyone in an organisation has something valuable to offer in making improvements and our techniques draw on this priceless and diverse resource. Our techniques are based on the disciplines of complexity science and knowledge management and include business- narrative, storytelling, communities of practice, social network analysis and open space technology. In fact Anecdote is regarded as a world leader in the practical applications of business-narrative.

Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools : eLearning Technology In my previous post, I examined Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective. That post focused primarily on how Social Bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us or Yahoo My Web can be used as part of Personal Learning. In this post, I want to focus on a specific scenario that involves Personal and Group Learning and how Web 2.0 tools apply to this need. Scenario - a learning development department in a mid size corporation has five staff members. They want to define an eLearning strategy that will look at (a) the business needs of their company and internal clients, (b) their performance and learning needs, (c) their learning strategies, and (d) what they need to do from a services, technology, process and people perspective to support this strategy. They will be creating this strategy over the next few months and have many strong feelings among the group about different things they can and should be doing. The strategy will ultimately be presented as part of the fall planning cycle and be used as part of budget justification. It will also be used to help communicate with internal clients about the services they provide and how they can work with these clients. They also want what they define in the strategy today to live on and evolve over time. In order to accomplish this, they need to learn quite a bit about where things are today in their business and in eLearning and where they are going in the future.

ABSTRACT Communities of practice consist of people who are informally as well as contextually bound by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice. Their focus on learning, competence, and performance bridges the gap between organizational learning and strategy topics and generates new insights for theory and practice. This paper outlines the rationale for a competence-based view of organizations and proposes a community-of-practice approach to address a number of important business challenges: mergers and acquisitions, leveraging and stretching competence across functions and SBUs, accelerating innovation, business-unit disaggregation, and outsourcing. Communities of Practice

Community of Practice Case Study Posted on July 25th, 2007 by Harold Jarche I'm working on a community of practice for green building technologies and am discussing business community networks here in the Maritimes. I thought it would be a good time to review some lessons from the first online community I was responsible for. The first online community of practice for which I was responsible was a project to enhance collaboration of members of the learning industry here in New Brunwsick, Canada (LearnNB). The initial focus of this CoP was research and development, especially business models and commercialization. It was not intended to be a theoretical or academic community, but one looking at the development of practical applications- be they products, services, standards or models. Membership was open to anyone.

Welcome to the Global Innovation Network www.ginnn.com is THE social network and community of practice dedicated to facilitating innovation and business development by bringing together businesses, entrepreneurs, academics, researchers and investors in one place. The more you put in to this community the more you will get out - so join in and get involved.

In the late 90's there was a lot of energy around "virtual communities." They were touted as the ultimate web deployment, the key to online commerce and later online education. Early adopters swarmed sites and racked up web hits in the millions. But then there was a deafening silence. Commerce and media sites began closing down their discussion boards. Even busy boards like CNN's were shuttered. Was the online community movement dead? No, it was just transforming itself, settling down and maturing into a space where it had real value and applicability. The bottom line is that online community or online interaction is not the goal. It's one means for helping groups achieve their goals. It is not necessarily about "online community" but what conditions and process are needed to enable communities to use the online environment.

A high-energy leader with successful record in product development and transformation. Brings deep experience in designing, selling and driving complex programs using disciplines of strategy, design, business development, leadership/team effectiveness, and workforce planning.

"Community manager is a role that more companies will adopt in the coming years. Jeremiah Owyang provide a huge list of companies who have such a champion already, and more recently gave businesses a scorecard for whether startups should have a community manager. "

Social network analysis (SNA) is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). A method to understand networks and their participants is to evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location is finding the centrality of a node. These measures help determine the importance, or prominence, of a node in the network. Network location can be different than location in the hierarchy, or organizational chart. We look at a social network, called the "Kite Network" (see above), developed by David Krackhardt, a leading researcher in social networks. Two nodes are connected if they regularly talk to each other, or interact in some way. For instance, in the network above, Andre regularly interacts with Carol, but not with Ike. Therefore Andre and Carol are connected, but there is no link drawn between Andre and Ike. This network effectively shows the distinction between the three most popular individual network measures: Degree Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Closeness Centrality.

Communities of Practice, a Brief Introduction Print This Page. Author: Etienne Wenger Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of communities of practice and their application to organizations. He was featured by Training Magazine in their "A new Breed of Visionaries" series. A pioneer of the "community of practice" research, he is author and co-author of seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991), where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept of communities of practice, and Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), addressed to practitioners in organizations. Etienne is also a founder of CPsquare, a cross-organizational, cross-sector community of practice on communities of practice. His work is influencing a growing number of organizations in the private and public sectors. Indeed, cultivating communities of practice is increasingly recognized as the most effective way for organizations to address the knowledge challenges they face. Etienne helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops, both online and face-to-face. His new research project, "Learning for a small planet," is a broad, cross-sectoral investigation of the nature of learning and learning institutions at the dawn of the new millennium. Check out his website www.ewenger.com

Excellent book covering the take up of social software in enterprise/business