Collaboration Approaches

Community of Practice

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a craft or a profession.

A CoP can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created deliberately with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop personally and professionally.

CoPs can exist in physical settings, for example, a lunch room at work, a field setting, a factory floor, or elsewhere in the environment, but members of CoPs do not have to be co-located. They form a "virtual community of practice" (VCoP) when they collaborate online, such as within discussion boards and newsgroups.

Customer Relationship Management

A form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is called Collaborative CRM (CCRM). Through Collaborative CRM companies seek to evolve products through sharing any information collected from interactions with their customers.

For example, as a company you might want customer feedback that is gathered from an email survey, which could inform your marketing staff about services of interest to customers.