The Networks Are Out There: Building Cultural and Economic Resilience Through Informal Communities of Practice

TL;DR

This paper investigates how informal communities of practice in developing economies can foster innovation and resilience by serving as prototyping spaces, using the case of a Peruvian video game community to illustrate key concepts.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of informal communities as innovation spaces in developing economies and analyzes a specific case to highlight methodological challenges in studying such communities.

Findings

Communities can reverse engineer technologies to innovate.

Informal communities serve as prototyping spaces for resilience.

Researching multi-sited communities presents methodological challenges.

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities offered by informal communities of practice to operate as "prototyping spaces" for innovation in the context of developing economies. It begins by looking at the concept of "economic complexity" and how it is useful in both guiding the priorities and evaluating the challenges developing economies face when attempting to drive growth and build measures of resilience, and raises the question of how these economies can both introduce higher complexity activities while compensating for latecomer disadvantages versus more complex economies. It then examines in detail the case of the Twin Eagles Group, a Peruvian video game development community in the 1990s, and how they reverse engineered technologies and global practices to pursue their creative objectives. Based on this case, it concludes by laying out some of the methodological challenges associated to researching this sort of community because of the multi-sited nature of their activities.