Improving interactions in knowledge intensive communities of practices for SMEs

Knowledge is a key to success also for small and medium sized companies (SMEs) but many of them lack of understanding what they want to accomplish with a knowledge management (KM) environment and are not ready to implement/use it. In this paper we first present the readiness of SMEs for KM, then we discuss if Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a suitable environment for KM and learning within SMEs. Finally we offer an example for development of knowledge intensive CoPs with efficient interactions both between the actors and with the corresponding supporting IT platforms.