Creating community language for a collaborative innovation community

In this chapter, we present a method for communities to continuously reproduce their identity with taking in new ideas. Communities, no matter how open or closed they may be, each have their identity that differentiates them from others. These are shared and practiced in the community implicitly in the form of spirits, visions, habits, attitudes, and senses. In this chapter, we present a method and example of scribing out the spirits, visions, habits, attitudes, and senses that are implicitly shared among the members of a community into small units as explicit words; consequently, it would allow them to communicate using the new words as part of their common language. As an example, we take the case of the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) of Keio University, a campus that conducts collaborative and innovative education and research in Japan. In this case, 27 words that represent the identity of SFC were extracted and organized by interviewing around 50 students, graduates, and faculty members. This chapter shows 3 words from 27 words in details.