Reputazione, apprendimento e innovazione nelle imprese: il ruolo delle online community

[Autom. eng. transl.] More than two thousand years ago, Seneca claimed that "the best ideas are everyone's property". If it has always seemed reasonable to assume that no one can hold the monopoly of creativity, why should companies and organizations today confine their most creative soul only within certain business functions, such as, for example, the R&D area? Would it not be more "reasonable" for them to try to find ideas and suggestions everywhere, addressing internal subjects but also those external to the organization? Building on this initial assumption, this volume was created with the aim of defining the informative role that online communities can play for a company, conceived as "places" in which a widespread knowledge resides among the members who participate. In them people voluntarily share their knowledge, experiences and opinions, thus transforming them into an important source from which to draw fundamental information to improve business processes. The work aims to read and interpret in organizational terms some implications for companies deriving from the increasingly massive use of online communities by their stakeholders, seen as carriers of knowledge and experience. The implications referred to are attributable to phenomena deriving from the introduction into the company of a community-based logic in the management of relationships, aimed at exploiting the characteristics of social media to foster collaboration, social interaction, the sharing of knowledge , experiences and opinions. In particular, these implications find application in four important areas of intervention: - organizational change linked to the use of information disseminated on the Web; - the online reputation of companies; - knowledge and related organizational learning processes; - the innovation processes activated on the basis of ideas generated by comparison and dialogue in an online community through open innovation models.