Induced Communities of Practice Enhance Organizational Performance – The Case of Lilly Critical Care Europe

This paper demonstrates how induced Communities of Practices (CoPs) can be initiated in combination with Customer Communities in order to increase profitability and develop a sustainable competitive advantage. The paper draws upon our experiences within Lilly Critical Care Europe 1 (Lilly CCE). The unique case study 2 highlights how induced CoPs were initiated to develop customer relevant competencies and transform them to customer solutions (i.e. internal integration) and how these experiences were leveraged to initiate Customer Communities (i.e. external integration). The investigation shows that Customer Community projects had a significant impact on European sales. During the initial 24 months, customers involved in community projects generated a sales increase that was 35.4 percent higher than the sales increase generated by customers not involved in such projects. Based on the findings, the paper presents critical success factors to be taken into consideration by other companies aiming at improving their integration through similar initiatives.