A community of knowledge practice is a constituency of many different characters. This community helps to harness the creativity and promote cross-fertilization of ideas necessary for innovation (Formica 2003: Chapter 2; Amidon, 2003). The notion of communities of practice originated with John Seely Brown, the director of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Brown suggested that "At the simplest level, they are a small group of people who’ve worked together over a period of time… not a team, not a task force, not necessarily an authorized or identified group…They are peers in the execution of ‘real work’. What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what the other knows”.

Aged barely 20, Ferrari spent much of his time frequenting the Bar de Nord on Turin's Ports Nuova, getting to know people and making connections. He aimed at creating trust, fashion, roles, and maximising the joint product of personal relationships within his small groups of peers, interacting informally out of the shop floor. Sharing and learning in the cafe, even playing cards rather than playing by business cards in the meetings: this was a common trait to the founders – in most cases, blue collars and technicians – of small companies in Italy.

Throughout the 1920's Ferrari spent a lot of time judiciously creating his commercial and engineering connections. He also began surrounding himself with a group of close collaborators, including Gioacchino Colombo - the man who would eventually design the first Ferrari car after masterminding the Alpha 158s under Ferrari's patronage - and former Fiat technician Luigi Bazzi, a man who would survive into the 1960's as possibly Enzo's longest-standing lieutenant, having originally joined him in 1923. Bazzi had joined Alfa Romeo as long ago as 1922 after a spell in Fiat's experimental department, and would later become tagged as the man who conceived the fearsome twin-engined Alfa Romeo 'Bimotore' in the 1930's.

Team building by an autocatalytic process: Transforming personal knowledge into organisational knowledge.

Ferrari ‘made’ Bazzi and Bazzi ‘made’ Ferrari. Not only Bazzi was a valued technical guiding hand, but also his long association with Enzo Ferrari enabled him to help smooth over the differences of opinion and temperamental problems which made working with his boss an increasingly unpredictable, sometimes tempestuous, challenge in later years.

Through dialogue and discussion cognitive conflicts and disagreement were raised, which questioned the existing premises. This made possible the transformation of personal knowledge into organisational knowledge.

During the time with Alpha Romeo, Bazzi was also responsible for tempting the highly respected engineer Vittorio Jano to leave Fiat to join the rival firm. Bazzi, who had also worked with Fiat, was at least partly responsible for persuading Ferrari that Jano was the right man for the job. Within months of joining Alfa, the ex-Fiat man was putting the finishing touches to the historic supercharged 2-litre P2, which made its competition debut in 1924.

Interpersonal collaboration across multiple boundaries – across cultures, functions, rivalries, geography – featured in a mix of rivalry and co-operation between motor racing entrepreneurs. Which gave birth, first, to knowledge pools and, then, to a knowledge cluster: the springboards for innovation through collaboration, rivalry and creative imitation.