Managing innovation in a virtual community of creation: the TIM Fellowship Programme

The locus of innovation is no longer within the firm, but within the communities, in which a common context of experiences allows members to activate knowledge creation processes, generating innovation. This paper suggests a new mechanism for managing distributed innovation in the Digital Economy: a virtual community of creation. A virtual community of creation is characterized by a strong and frequent use/application of ICTs and tools, in order to sustain the problem of explicitating more formal knowledge and introduce planned strategies for the collection and documentation of ideas and suggestions of members. In this perspective, we present and analyses the case of TIM Fellowship Programme, a project started by TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile) in collaboration with eBMS-ISUFI (University of Lecce, Italy), with the aims to build a virtual community of creation composed by TIM employees and students in order to create and sustain a new mechanism for generating business innovation.