Learning Communities: The Ecology of Knowing
a collaborative inquiry facilitated,
by Etienne Wenger and Richard McDermott

Many companies today are becoming keenly aware of how central knowledge and learning are to maintaining their competitive advantage. But to leverage knowledge for competitive advantage involves far more than building knowledge repositories, sharing best practices, or increasing the role of corporate education. These common "knowledge management" approaches take a very narrow, static view of knowledge and can at best only deal with existing knowledge.

To truly leverage knowledge for competitive advantage, it is not enough merely to capture the knowledge that was important in the past. You also need the capacity to retain this knowledge in a way that has sustained relevance; and you need the capacity to build new knowledge, the knoweldge that will be important in the future. One way to do this is to foster learning communities that own, organize, share, develop, and create knowledge. In this session we will develop a more dynamic and systemic view of how knowledge "lives" in an organization and what it takes to foster the necessary ecology of communities. We would like to open a discussion that includes both theory and practice and addresses the following issues: