Communities of Practice for Open Innovation: Enabling Organizational Creativity?

"Open innovation" is often mentioned as a successful model for innovation, but little research has investigated if this model can provide the necessary prerequisites for a creative environment essential to innovate. This paper aims at analyzing the prerequisites of creativity from the perspective of a community of practice that is emerging in an open innovation arena. It is also meant to contribute to an increased understanding of how creativity can be managed in this context. We present a theoretical overview of open innovation, communities of practice and of organizational creativity. This indicates that the community of practice that is emerging in this open innovation context should be able to fulfill previously established prerequisites for creativity (Amabile et al., 1996). We present empirical findings from a case study of SAFER, an open vehicle and traffic safety innovation arena, to see if the prerequisites could be fulfilled in practice. The findings are based on interviews with representatives from the 22 participating organizations at SAFER. For the qualitative analysis of the empirical data, an established model of assessing creativity in work environments has been used as a framework (Amabile et al., 1996). The findings in this paper indicate that despite the promising theoretical conditions for creativity in open innovation, in practice, the prerequisites have proven hard to live up to. Our analysis show that the factors that do contribute to making SAFER a functioning open innovation arena, are strongly related to key characteristics of a CoP; the blend of different backgrounds of workers, the highly motivated persons attracted to this arena, the external ties enabling knowledge sharing as well as strong internal ties and a shared vision among the practitioners.