How the orchestration of communities of practice drives innovation and resilience ::a review and research agenda

Purpose – This paper aims to determine how communities of practice (CoPs) influence innovation in the firm to promote organizational resilience. Specifically, this paper focuses on how the orchestration of CoPs can promote the exploitation and exploration of knowledge in the firm to innovate. Design/Methodology/Approach – Using a hybrid narrative perspective, a review of the literature enables to build a conceptual model of the orchestration of communities of practice for innovation and highlights avenues for future research. Research implications – This paper shows the importance of of orchestrating communities of practice to realize innovation. The focus of this paper is on innovation generated by CoPs as well as on the interactions between CoPs to achieve innovation. Thanks to the management of emergent and piloted communities of practice and interactions between communities, different types of innovation can be achieved. Originality/value – This paper addresses the orchestration of communities of practice to achieve innovation in the firm. It stresses the role of communities of practice in innovation as well as highlights the importance of interactions between communities of practice and across different types of communities. It conceptualizes the orchestration of communities of practice as a capability that can enable firms to advance innovation. By integrating several perspectives on communities of practice, this paper proposes a conceptual model with six levers to orchestrate communities of practice to reach innovation in organizations, and increase resilienc