Innovation Starts In Your Employees

People think that they are good at sharing information, but in practice they’re not. 

Good communication is key in the transfer of ideas and project development and culture change would be impossible without good communication. Extracting tactical knowledge will be very difficult without understanding the different learning styles in their co-workers.

What is a Community of Purpose?

A Community of Purpose (COP) is made up by a group of people that share a common interest which they are actively practising. It can evolve naturally or can be created specifically for a purpose. The aim of a COP is to gain knowledge and expertise related to a specific field. There is no right or wrong in terms of what it is, there is no one size fits all. 

A Community of Purpose provides a forum to prioritise and focus on what is relevant and actionable. It is about relationship building and networking. In a COP, group members will go through a process of sharing knowledge and experiences with each other to learn and develop themselves professionally and personally.

It will help to break down communication barriers.

One of the best practices seen across organisations is a formalised approach to build a Community of Purpose (or a Centre of Excellence) to develop Innovation Capability or Capacity across your organisation.

A well defined Community of Purpose (COP) acts as internal ambassadors or change agents representing different parts in the business to maximise and focus impact in your organisation.

Building a COP


A COP will have representation from Corporate Functions as well as from each Business Unit or Category. 

Example of a Community of Practice 

Cascading Knowledge Throughout the Organisation

Some customers use their engagement with Pure Insight to build basic capability (or capacity) within their wider Innovation Community across Business Units or Categories. However, it will not be sufficient to understand the external perspective and learnings from other companies on a particular subject matter on its own.

The key will be how to take this external insight and learnings and configure, adopt and embed them in such a way so tangible value is delivered within your business.

As a best practice you might want to consider forming different work groups (a subset of your COP) focusing on a key challenge area that specifically focuses on taking the output of bespoke training and turning that into specific tools and processes that are trialled in the businesses. The process of trialling such methods works best by using them on live projects and initiatives.

Pick members of staff that are volunteering or who are passionate to drive and affect the change of innovation within your business. Ensure their direct line managers are informed of the scope and purpose of the COP and allow them to allocate some of their time to creating and developing the Community.

During the day, participants cover:

• Understand what a Community of Practice is, and the impact it has in their company. 
• Learning from Failure. 
• Learning Styles - how to use them to improve their learning. 
• Colour Thinking Model - using influential language under pressure. 
• How people have different levels of impact in the organisation. 
• How to lead change in an organisation. 
• Case Studies of Communities of Practice.