Innovation and Communities

Discovered this interesting website on Collective Intelligence/Communities and read this article on "Innovation and Communities of Practice" today. I thoroughly enjoyed the article (it actually happens to be an extract/chapter from a book) and found myself highlighting and underlining quite a few thoughts/statements in it. 


Here are some extracts:


* People with talents in multiple disciplines are better poised to see and connect the dots of breakthrough possibilities
* Managers whose discussion networks more often spanned structural holes were more likely to express their ideas, less likely to have their ideas dismissed by senior management, and more likely to have their ideas evaluated as valuable
* Horizontal mobility is, no doubt, one of the ways to cultivate multidisciplinary performers, among which there is a higher concentration of disruptive innovators than among people with only professional identity 
* The fastest way to get smarter in any domain is to join its community of practice, and this is a trend likely to expand its reach to all industries
* The future belongs to organizations that learned to truly unleash the creative powers of self-organizing project communities, knowledge networks, open source teams, and other new ways of work and learning, based on free associations of people who are passionate about what they do together. Communities of practice are in the center of this widening innovation movement
* We nourish life with our generative relationships, as well as with value creation and exchange. Communities of practice are the “sweet spot” of those two dimensions
* The vitality of knowledge ecology--the rainforest of ideas, insights and inspirations - and innovation ecology depends on the same as the vitality of natural ecosystems: their diversity
* Innovation frequently recombines facts and assessments in existing knowledge and the relationships between them. Therefore, how well those community-based knowledge assets are organized and validated is a substantive factor of the organization’s innovation capacity
* When coordination is lubricated by trustful relationship amongst the players, then there is less friction, its transaction cost is lower and results are better
* The meta-capability of collaboration is the No. 1 competitive advantage in the innovation ecology
* Customer communities of practice are particularly essential to accelerate the adoption of an innovation if it is highly complex
* Radical innovation needs people who are members in multiple communities, and play a role of “cultural translators” between them
* Shift in deeply seated mental models, the mutual inspiration and push-back necessary to radical innovation, are most likely to occur in high-trust relationships fostered by the communities
* People freely associating with another, combining their talents, and sharing their learning edges to complete projects or upgrade their skills and invent new ones, are the most generative source of permanent innovation