Les communautés d'innovation [Communities of innovation]

How can we pilot communities of innovation? What benefits can we expect? What difficulties should we anticipate? An increasing number of companies organize their networks of employees, clients or suppliers, and encourage exchanges among these communities. Their objectives? To accelerate knowledge sharing, to multiply the sources of inspiration, to accelerate and enrich the innovation process. Yet, if the advantages of such an approach seem obvious, developing and fostering these communities of innovation and gaining from them presents clear challenges for business organizations. For example, how can you let a community free to self-organize and, at the same time, provide the necessary support for it to thrive? How can you drive value for the company without being at the controls? Fortunately, numerous returns of experience provide an answer to these questions. This collective work analyzes eleven organizations that relied on communities of innovation under different forms and to various extents. It thus considers among others Decathlon and its crowdsourcing platform, Schneider Electric and its communities of practice, Schmidt Groupe and its Creativ’café, etc. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific case. It identifies the success criteria of those communities; it also presents the difficulties they created for the companies and how those responded. A final chapter consolidates the teachings from these initiatives. Each case is very detailed and you will find, page after page, numerous ideas to test in your own communities. An enriching read.