درک ساختار نوآوری از طریق دید جوامع عمل (COP)  Understanding innovation mechanism through the lens of communities of practice (COP)

1. Introduction In the rapidly changing and competitive worldwide market environment, enterprises need to promote innovation and improve creative capacity to gain competitive advantage, which requires these companies absorb and integrate various knowledge and skills. Thus, they need to build a comprehensive knowledge platform. However, for companies, especially small and medium ones, the main restriction is the enormous fixed cost of establishing a complicated and continuously updated knowledge platform. We suggest that enterprises should not ignore an effective but low cost platform of knowledge—communities of practice, under the circumstances that most enterprises are not able to afford their own knowledge exchange platform or manage knowledge effectively. In simple terms, communities of practice can be understood as professional informal cooperation and communication networks. This organization phenomenon was first mentioned by Orr (1990). He found the Xerox customer service representatives’ tips and tricks exchanged over breakfast or lunch can improve their professional working ability and performance significantly (Orr, 1990). Communities of practice spread individual tacit knowledge and transform it into organizational knowledge. They can also be called professional communities, as COP members tend to have a similar background and share professional experiences, skills, information, knowledge, and opinions together. Typical communities of practice include playwright community, game designers community, artist community, etc. Communities of practice can bear most of the fixed costs incurred by production and accumulation of professional knowledge. In communities of practice, members share experiences, skills, and explanations etc., all of which are the prerequisites to learn and create new knowledge. This kind of knowledge is not always covered by a traditional company’s hierarchy and education. When enterprise requires constant innovation or creation of new knowledge, this system could make up for the drawbacks of traditional enterprise learning. Till now, the researches on the function of communities of practice have reached consensus mainly in two aspects: (1) Communities of practice promotes knowledge sharing. It provides knowledge database and builds norms, trust and assessment in favor of knowledge sharing (Boland and Tenkasi, 1995; Pattinson and Preece, 2014 etc.); (2) Communities of practice improve the performance of individuals or organizations. It helps to promote the performance on the level of individual, group, and organization by reducing the learning curve, avoiding overlapping investment on new products and services, improving employees’ working experience, and accumulating professional talents for the organization (Rongo, 2013; Chu et al., 2012, etc.).