Communities of Practice and Open Business
Communities of Practice (CoP in short) are defined as groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wegner, McDermott and Snyder, 2002). Hence, it seems that an Open Business cultivates and sets the ideal bedrock where CoP can act and interact with freedom and equipotentiality through self-selection and self-organisation of their members. The imagination, alignment and engagement, which are the three infrastructures of learning (Wegner, 1998),
are vital for the creative operation of an Open Business and simultaneously induce innovative things to happen.
I would like to extend a little bit here and provide some definitions related to the three fore mentioned infrastructures of learning, as I argue that only through learning the “revolution”, which I will mention in my conclusion, occurs. So, roughly speaking engagement is the active involvement in mutual processes of negotiation of meaning (Wegner, 1998) while alignment is the coordination of energy and activities in order to contribute to broader activities (Wegner, 1998). Moreover, imagination is the process of creating images of the world and seeing connections through time and space by extrapolating from one’s experience (Wegner, 1998) in order to achieve orientation and realise the possibilities.
Concluding, I state that the Open Business model is the result of CoP’s, in the beginning subconscious and now conscious, “revolution” for restoring the universal (as a matter of learning), open (as a matter of participation and creation) and progressive (as a matter of evolution) meaning of learning, creation and innovation’s conceptual model.
