There is an old saying that it is the string and not the pearls that
make a necklace. A good example may be cited in the case of an engineer in a
manufacturing industry and a marketing professional in the same company.
The two may need to regularly exchange information about a specific product
on which they both are working with – the engineer to produce it, and the
marketing professional to sell it. They need to help one another in order to
gain a broader view of the product and understand it better. The engineer
needs to understand what kind of product would sell while the marketing
professional needs to know what can be produced efficiently with the
available facilities and materials. In a community of practice that addresses
that particular product, the two will interact not so much because they have
to but because they find their interaction useful. Through the community of
practice, they exchange knowledge that is useful in their own particular fields
of practice.