Professional Virtual Communities

Professional Virtual Community (PVC) is a concept developed within EU FP6 project ECOLEAD. A PVC represents a group of individual professionals sharing a common knowledge scope and willing to take a business opportunity via establishing Virtual Teams (VTs) together with other PVC members and providing the services to external customers.

Association of “individuals” (knowledge workers) identified by a specific knowledge scope with an explicit business orientation

The PVC Mission

The PVC mission consists in generating value through members’ interaction, sharing and collaboration.

The generated value consists of:

Advanced Knowledge
Professional services
Social capital

The PVC value system accounts for an appropriate balance of the Knowledge, Business and Social (KBS) dimensions.

The PVC is designed to

best deliver innovation
maximize the realization of individuals

Professional Services of the PVC

Professional Services exploiting a “frontier” knowledge

Original applications of state-of-the-art knowledge
First implementations of emerging innovative methodologies
Innovation driven knowledge creation

High adaptability to market conditions (i.e. being able to provide the new services satisfying the emerging needs of the market) through a flat self-adaptive organisation.

The PVC Governance principles
PVC is a Human-centric organization and its governance principles can be defined as follows:

Empowerment. All decisions and responsibility must be taken, as far as possible, at the lowest hierarchical level. As a result, for instance, the PVC business activities are fully endorsed by the VT members (the contract is between VT and the client, the PVC itself carrying out a brokerage function)

Self-committment. The members’ participation to PVC activities, in terms of both quantity (which percentage of their working time) and typology (which kind of activities, such as research, industrial application, internal projects etc.), is decided by the member itself on a voluntary basis. The PVC member is not a PVC employee.

Self-organising leadership. The organisation of PVC collaborative activities is left, as much as possible, to the actors actually performing those activities.

Peer assessment. Any time there is the necessity for subjective evaluation (e.g. project selection and award, prize award, quality control, subjective performance metrics ) this is done by assembling an ad –hoc peer committee which is empowered to take the decision.

PVC Benefits

To minimise the overall network costs through the sharing of knowledge resources
To enable and control “innovation cycles” within the network, while minimising networks’ companies investments
To infer “cooperation readiness” in the network
To improve interactions with universities and research centres
To manage flexible knowledge resources (free lance, consultants) in a controlled manner
To retain network knowledge through the inclusion of retired personnel from the companies
To motivate knowledge workers, so maximising individuals’ productivity and creativity
To realise network knowledge workers’ lifelong learning in a cost effective manner.