Learning through interactions across COPs

Social interaction by the members of a local COP with ‘outsiders’ can be a source of

‘something new’ for the whole community, and can trigger or inform transformations to local practice. This section focuses on interactions between COP members with

‘outsiders’ who engage in different practices. In other words, this section is about learning through interactions across COPs.

Communities performing different practices develop different ‘knowing’ in practice.

Nooteboom (2008) claims that radical changes are more likely to result from interactions across COPs, than from interactions within a COP, because of the dissimilarity in knowledge bases across COPs. Amin and Roberts (2008c) argue that even ‘professional COPs’ can generate radical innovation through interactions with

other communities. However, Brown and Duguid (2001) note that sharing knowledge across COPs can be problematic because different practices entail also different languages (or professional jargon), values, norms and general worldviews. There is a consensus in the literature that “The boundaries between communities of practice represent, on the one hand, a barrier between different sets of practice and, on the other, an opportunity for cross-fertilization and for the discovery of different perspectives.”

(Tagliaventi and Mattarelli, 2006: 295).

Carlile (2004) identifies three types of boundaries between communities: a syntactic or information-processing boundary; a semantic or interpretative boundary; and a pragmatic or political boundary. He suggests that crossing these respective boundaries requires: the transfer of knowledge, the translation of knowledge; and the transformation of knowledge. Despite difficulties involved in sharing knowledge across the boundaries between COPs, there is evidence that learning occurs in cross-community interactions (Carlile, 2002; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000; Scarbrough and Swan, 2008; Bechky, 2003). The difficulties involved in sharing knowledge across COPs can be mitigated by the use of boundary objects⁸ (Swan et al., 2007), the use of generic terms to communicate (Bechky, 2003; Tagliaventi and Mattarelli, 2006), working side-by-side or ‘operational proximity’ (Tagliaventi and Mattarelli, 2006), engagement in joint projects (Scarbrough and Swan, 2008; Carlile, 2002), the work of knowledge brokers, and shared organisational values in the case of COPs within the same organisation (Tagliaventi and Mattarelli, 2006; Nooteboom, 2008).

Tagliaventi and Mattarelli (2006) found that individuals from different COPs

‘taught’ one another their respective practices. In their study, doctors in the oncology unit ‘taught’ technicians how to make certain decisions, while the technicians ‘taught’

the doctors how to use the irradiation equipment. However, an individual can learn from interactions across COPs regardless of whether the members of the other community

‘teach’ them or not. A member of a COP learns something new as he or she “comes to understand how knowledge from another community fits within the context of his own work, enriching and altering what he knows” (Bechky, 2003: 321). I argue that interactions between COPs can potentially provide new insights into how to engage with colleagues to get the work done, what to do to get the work done, and what tools, routines, words, or rules of thumb to use. In the context of KTOs, we would expect

8 “artefacts, documents, terms, concepts, and other forms of reification around which communities of practice can organize their interconnections” Wenger (1998: 105)

technology transfer staff to learn through interactions with members of other COPs, such as academics, research support staff, university finance managers, patent agents, business consultants, venture capitalists, etc. The learning takes place regardless of whether or not there is a conscious attempt to ‘teach’ one another.

Interactions across COPs often occur during joint projects. However, they do not necessarily have lasting effects on practice (Carlile, 2002). Joint projects could be particularly relevant to KTOs since they involve technology transfer professionals engaging with academics, venture capitals, patent agents, and licensees. Scarbrough and Swan (2008) examined learning in projects using a practice-based view of learning.

Although their study does not focus explicitly on learning via interactions across COPs, it does provide some relevant insights. Scarbrough and Swan described a project that involved members of different occupational COPs, aimed at improving cataract treatment in a Midlands Hospital, involving optometrists, general practitioners (GPs), nurses from the hospital’s eye unit and surgical consultants. All involved had the opportunity to learn about the skills and capabilities of the members of other professional groups. Interactions between members of the optometrist community and members of the community of GPs provided the optometrists with opportunities for learning and resulted in a new understanding of what optometrists could do to speed up diagnosis of a cataract. The optometrists in their interactions with GPs learnt what diagnostic tools and routines they could adopt. As a result of these interactions, the diagnosis activity became a part of the optometrists’ practice. Thus, learning through interactions across COPs led to a radical change in what is done by the optometrists.

This section has shown that learning occurs through interactions among members of a COP with ‘outsiders’ with different practices. Some scholars argue that interactions across COPs result in more radical innovation (Amin and Roberts, 2008c; Nooteboom, 2008), but there is little empirical evidence to substantiate these claims. The study by Scarbrough and Swan (2008) gives some indication that this form of learning generates radical changes in ‘the what’. However, there is no reason to suppose that incremental changes would not be informed by learning across COPs. This aspect is addressed in my empirical analysis.

Section 3.3.3 discusses learning through interactions with ‘outsiders’ with similar practices, based in different locations, that is, learning within NOPs. This can be also an important mode of learning for university KTOs.