Chefs’ Communities of Practice for Managing Innovations in the Tourism and Hospitality Sectors

Abstract

This paper aims to verify how communities of practice influence the development of innovations in the gastronomy sector. Primary data were collected at the interval of 1 year and achieved an amount of ten interviews using an unstructured interview with an in-depth interview with renowned chefs with parallel academic careers. To collect the data, the researcher adopted a snowball method, where the interviewees were motivated to indicate another participant until the study achieves theoretical saturation. The data were analysed using grounded theory through the analysis of incidents in three cycles of coding (open, axial, and selective), which enabled the generation of data-driven and theory-driven categories. The findings showed that chefs use their communities of practice to obtain the tacit and explicit knowledge they need to innovate in their menus. This study provides as practical implications a description of how chefs deal with sharing knowledge when they are thinking about menu modifications and how they obtained the necessary tacit and explicit knowledge to innovate in their menus to keep them up to date to the competitive marketing. The study carried out presents the process of obtaining knowledge using the community of practice by chefs to innovate in their menus.