A Design Framework for Building a Virtual Community of Practice

Sustaining competitiveness in global market is dependent on organizations' capacity to innovate; revelation of tacit knowledge and its incorporation in organisations' structures and processes, comprise an important factor in exploring and implementing innovation. Virtual communities of practice (CoPs) and virtual learning communities are becoming widespread within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) thanks to technological developments which enable increased communication, interactivity among participants and incorporation of collaborative pedagogical models, specifically through information communications technologies (ICTs). This paper presents a design framework for building a Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) incorporating company stakeholders, academics, researchers and school practitioners as prospect members of the community, who interact on the basis of knowledge sharing on IT technologies and engineering: the design characteristics, important concepts, structures and preliminary data are presented. Design research sets the methodological framework used, while, in the context of applying ethnographic practices, qualitative data have been collected to support the proposed design mechanism.