Designing Communities of Practice as Physical Knowledge Platforms through Platform Thinking

This paper examines how Platform Thinking can support the design of inter-organizational Communities of Practice as physical knowledge platforms. Emerging technologies such as AI require firms to access, interpret, and apply distributed knowledge, yet established manufacturing firms often struggle to translate technological opportunities into actionable use cases. Communities of Practice can support learning and innovation, but their intentional design remains challenging, especially when multiple firms need to collaborate while preserving autonomy, trust, and competitive boundaries. Drawing on Design Science, we study the design of the AI for Manufacturing within a territorial Community of Practice involving 10 internationally active manufacturing firms in Northern Italy. The empirical material includes 7 in-person workshops, more than 150 completed templates, more than 23 hours of recordings, 8 interviews, synthesis documents, and evidence of formal adoption of the proposed artifact. The study shows how an initially ambiguous community idea was transformed into a yearly paced physical knowledge platform organized around knowledge seekers, knowledge providers, orchestrators, and structured formats of learning, sharing, and doing. The paper contributes to Platform Thinking by extending its design logic toward physical knowledge platforms. It also contributes to Communities of Practice literature by showing how intentional design can become an early community-building activity.