  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.
