Using Guilds to Foster Internal Startups in Large Organizations: A case study
This addresses the challenge of software product innovation in large organizations by fostering employee-driven innovation, though it is incremental as it confirms existing benefits in a new context.
The study investigated how communities of practice, specifically an Innovation guild, support internal startups in developing new software products within a large organization, finding that they enable collective problem-solving, shared practices, and knowledge sharing.
Software product innovation in large organizations is fundamentally chal-lenging because of restrained freedom and flexibility to conduct experi-ments. As a response, large agile companies form internal startups to initiate employ-driven innovation, inspired by Lean startup. This case study investi-gates how communities of practice support five internal startups in develop-ing new software products within a large organization. We observed six communities of practice meetings, two workshops and conducted ten semi-structured interviews over the course of a year. Our findings show that a community of practice, called the Innovation guild, allowed internal startups to help each other by collectively solving problems, creating shared practic-es, and sharing knowledge. This study confirms that benefits documented in earlier research into CoPs also hold true in the context of software product innovation in large organizations. Henceforth, we suggest that similar innova-tion guilds, as described in this paper, can support large companies in the in-novation race for new software products.