Communities of practice (CoPs) are groups of people in organizations who come together to share what they know, to learn from one another regarding some aspects of their work and to provide a social context for that work.¹

Through our work in Value Chain Partnerships, we have found that communities of practice (CoPs) function strategically as:

1. Catalysts for cooperation of diverse interests to create solutions for food and fiber producers and businesses;
2. Hubs which create, capture, document, and leverage knowledge and deploy this knowledge as technical assistance to assist value chain partners;
3. Magnets to attract funding, and for leveraging, channeling, and distributing funding to research and development efforts for differentiated food and fiber products; and
4. Scouts to identify emerging value chain opportunities with high potential to deliver economic benefit to sustainable agriculture stakeholders.

Knowledge management is a framework for designing an organization’s goals, structures and processes so that the organization can use what it knows to learn, and to create value for its customers and community.²

Value chains are strings of companies or collaborating players who work together to satisfy market demands for specific products or services.

A value system is defined as follows: A connected series of organizations, resources, and knowledge streams involved in the creation and delivery of value to end customers. Value systems integrate supply chain activities, from determination of customer needs through product/service development, production/operations and distribution, including (as appropriate) first-, second-, and third-tier suppliers. The objective of value systems is to position organizations in the supply chain to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction and value while effectively exploiting the competencies of all organizations in the supply chain.³

The VCP project is most interested in adding sustainability to the value chain concept — sustainable value chains emphasize long-term, significant economic return to all firms in a chain, particularly producers who follow production practices using the highest standards of environmental and community stewardship.

In a value chain business arrangement, each actor in the chain must make a mental shift from simply “What is best for my firm and my firm now?” to “What can I do in my firm to maximize the economic, environmental and community benefit to all the members of this value chain?” A significant change often comes in the form of information sharing. In a value chain members need to share a great deal more business information with one another so that all can make better decisions that affect the group.

1. Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice, Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
2. W.C. Choo, The FIS Knowledge Management Institute, session presentations, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto.
3. Supply Chain Redesign (Handfield and Nichols, 2002 Financial Times Management)