key: cord-031995-itu5ix98
authors: Goglio-Primard, Karine; Simon, Laurent; Cohendet, Patrick; Aharonson, Barak S.; Wenger-Trayner, Etienne
title: Managing with communities for innovation, agility, and resilience
date: 2020-09-17
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2020.08.003
sha: 
doc_id: 31995
cord_uid: itu5ix98

nan

The COVID-19 pandemic is a health and social crisis devastating populations and disrupting our society, economy, and organizations. In response, companies such as Dassault Aviation proposed leveraging collective intelligence to source, qualify, and design engineering and manufacturing solutions. An open COVID-19 community emerged to consolidate a worldwide list of projects and connect them to people looking for solutions or willing to help. Unprecedented collaborative impulses and communitarian gatherings developed in all areas: help for caregivers (carers), support for families, a consortium of companies to respond to the shortage of resuscitation equipment, etc. In these troubled times, the spontaneous responses from communities are multiple and impactful, supporting creative endeavors and fostering innovations for resilience.

The concept of knowing communities (KCs) refers to the vast body of creative informal networks that repeatedly interact and exchange knowledge to support the dynamic processes of creation and innovation (Amin & Roberts, 2008; Cohendet et al., 2008) . These informal groups are made up of individuals willing to produce and mutualize new knowledge by connecting people belonging to different entities (David & Foray, 2002) . Their properties emphasize their social dimension: the voluntary commitment to exchange and share common cognitive resources; a common identity built on their practice and repeated exchange; and the respect of specific social norms (Cohendet et al., 2008; Wenger, 1998) . Knowing communities leverage value creation and performance within firms (Brown & Duguid, 1991 , 2001 Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger et al., 2002 Wenger et al., , 2011 Wenger-Trayner, Fenton-O'Creevy, Hutchinson, & Kubiak, 2015) and favor innovation. Their role appears even more essential in times of crisis as they provide rapid answers to complex issues and foster collective resilience. The solutions lie in the attitudes of individuals and collectives and cannot be found only in controlled, predictive, streamlined, and optimized systems. The formation of a broad community of peers and experts from different disciplines frees the collective intelligence and social imagination.

Within this vast body of knowing communities, the notion of collective has been recently introduced and studied in the practice-based theory of knowledge. In 2009, Laurent Simon's (2009) study of creative cities identified a new and "unrecognized actor" referred to as "creative Collective." For Simon, this particular form of groups is neither a network (even though it is connected to networks), nor a pure form of community (even though it shares some of its characteristics). This hybrid form comes across as a "truly communitarian form of a community" (p. 41) whose members gather to defend a common vision presented as a creative alternative. Rather than gathering for the main purpose of producing or accumulating knowledge, they mostly gather around shared values and for the defense of social progress. While these groups claim a specific identity (Cohendet, 2006) , they also need knowledge and competences to serve their project (Paraponaris & Rohr, 2015) .

Collectives are defined as informal networks made up of heterogeneous actors promoting a common societal cause (Crespin-Mazet et al., 2017) and can be seen as precursors of epistemic communities. While communities emphasize the acquisition of expertise or free access to expertise located in other organizations (scientific goal), collectives emphasize altruism, public action, the adoption of innovative practices by the largest number, and the highest level of sharing among members in order to transform society. In sum, members of communities cooperate to increase their skills and practice while members of collectives collaborate because they share specific values reflecting the dynamics of civil society (Paraponaris & Rohr, 2015) .

The complementary roles of communities and collectives in times of crisis seem essential for strengthening collective resilience. On the one hand, collectives are built on societal projects, aiming for new proposals and change (Paraponaris et al., 2013) . They are geared towards the future and defend "a society opened to new values, broader interests and open access to knowledge" (p. 10). They are naturally opened to other social groups with whom they can confront information and knowledge in an effort towards enrichment. On the other hand, communities aim to defend their members' competences and expertise in order to support their regime of competence: their actions directly benefit their members and not the society as a whole. Hence, community members can be characterized by solidarity while members of a collective are characterized by complementarity. In sum, communities naturally raise borders to external knowledge while collectives naturally aim at crossing them.

Our intention in this Management Focus is to analyze the dynamics of knowledge communities (communities of practice and collectives) with respect to innovation, agility, and the resilience of organizations. Innovation will increasingly draw its main source from communities and collectives. These informal communities act as various active units, with potentially different roles, at different stages of the innovation process. Given the source of creativity provided by these new organizational forms, companies should establish a strong yet respectful relationship with them in order to harvest their creative outputs and nurture the organization's formal innovative processes (Sarazin et al., 2017) , especially in times of crisis.

European Management Journal 1 How can knowledge communities' dynamics (i.e., communities of practice and collectives) foster organizational resilience? 2 How to create and animate a community, with experts, customers, and users, to develop innovation, agility, and resilience in times of crisis. 3 What are the specific characteristics of the notion of collectives? 4 How to mix these new organizational forms (i.e., communities of practice, collectives, and epistemic communities) to innovate and resist the crisis. 5 How can collectives promote a common societal cause outside the organization and obtain the adhesion and legitimacy of the greatest number? 6 How the spontaneous responses of communities and collectives can support innovations, e.g., resilience in formal hierarchical structure. 7 How can organizations support communities and collectives? 8 What are the management mechanisms (organizational levers) that support the development of innovative practices within knowing communities? 9 How to develop the interactions between formal structures (the hierarchical structures of companies) and knowing communities (i.e., communities of practice, collectives, etc.) 10 How can the productions of knowing communities be exploited, disseminated, and institutionalized through a formal structure?

The KCO (Knowledge Communities Observatory) have organized a symposium for June 9e10, 2021, in the Kedge Business School, Toulon, France, and the proposed Management Focus will be one of the academic outputs. This call is open to all scholars to ensure that those not involved in the KCO symposium can also submit papers. Full papers for consideration by the guest editors should be submitted to Karine.goglio@kedgebs.com by September 25, 2021.

Every paper submitted to this Management Focus section of the European Management Journal (EMJ) must provide a clear scientific and practical contribution. Conceptual or review and empirical papers will be considered. All submissions will be subject to EMJ's usual double-blind peer-review process and should respect the journal's guidelines. Publication of the selected articles in EMJ's Management Focus section is planned for 2022. You may direct any questions to the guest editor: Karine.goglio@kedgebs.com.

EMJ is a flagship scholarly journal, publishing internationally leading research across all areas of management. EMJ articles challenge the status quo through critically informed empirical and theoretical investigations, and present the latest thinking and innovative research on major management topics, while still being accessible and interesting to non-specialists. EMJ articles are characterized by their intellectual curiosity and diverse methodological approaches, which lead to contributions that impact profoundly on management theory and practice. We welcome interdisciplinary research that synthesizes distinct research traditions to shed new light on contemporary challenges in the broad domain of European business and management.

Dr Karine Goglio-Primard is an Associate Professor of B to B Marketing at Kedge Business School, Toulon, France. Her research focuses on communities of practice that emerge in organizations and are cultivated to nurture innovation and business development. She founded the Knowledge Communities Observatory (KCO) at Kedge Business School, which brings together companies (Crouzet, ENGIE, Expleo, Laerdal Medical, Schneider Electric, Sartorius Stedim, Spie Batignolles, etc.) and expert researchers on communities. Within the KCO, she analyzes how the formal structures of companies integrate the production of communities into their innovation process. Her research has been published in journals such as Management International, Journal of Business Research, and Management Decision.

Dr Laurent Simon is a Professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at HEC Montr eal. He is also Co-Director of the Mosaic, Creativity & Innovation Hub, HEC Montr eal. He teaches courses on the management of innovation and creativity, design thinking, and business models. His research focuses on the organization, management, and performance of creative and innovative processes at the individual, collective, organizational, and territorial levels. In 2017, he co-edited The Elgar Companion to Innovation and Knowledge Creation. His research has been published in journals such as Organization Science, Journal of Economic Geography, Industry and Innovation, and Management International.

Dr Patrick Cohendet is a Professor in the Department of International Business at HEC Montr eal. He is also Co-Director of the Mosaic, Creativity and Innovation Hub, HEC Montr eal and Co-Editor of Management International. His teaching, research, and publications focus on the economics and management of innovation, knowledge, and creativity. He is the author of more than 80 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and 15 books, including Architectures of Knowledge co-authored with Ash Amin. In 2017, he co-edited The Elgar Companion to Innovation and Knowledge Creation. His research has been published in journals such as Research Policy, Organization Science, and Industrial and Corporate Change.

Dr Barak S. Aharonson is a Professor of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at Xiamen School of Management, Xiamen University, China, and a member of the Faculty of Management at Coller School of Business, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is an Associate Editor for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation section of the European Management Journal. His research pertains to strategy and organizational theory focusing on technology, innovation, and entrepreneurial activity; knowledge flows within and across geographic agglomerations and networks; the evolution, creation, and diffusion of technologies and innovations; and international business. His work has been published in leading journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Research Policy, and Global Strategy Journal.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner is a Global Thought Leader in the field of communities of practice and social learning systems. He is the author and co-author of seminal books on communities of practice, including Situated Learning; Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity; Cultivating Communities of Practice; Digital Habitats; and Landscapes of Practice. His work as researcher, author, and consultant has influenced both thinking and practice in a wide variety of fields, including business, education, government, and social theory.

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