Article · August 2026 · 7 min read

The Communities Matrix: not every community works the same way

By Roel Ottens

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

We often use community as a catch-all term. A business network, an innovation ecosystem, a professional association and a group of entrepreneurs exchanging referrals can all be called communities.

But look closer and they are fundamentally different.

They create value differently. They require different levels of commitment. And, most importantly, they need to be designed and managed differently.

That is why I use the Communities Matrix.

The matrix is adapted from the work of Edwin Kaats and Wilfrid Opheij, who distinguish four basic forms of collaboration. Their original model focuses primarily on collaboration between a limited number of organisations or partners. I believe the same distinction is highly useful when looking at multi-party collaborations and communities.

It gives us a simple question to start designing a community:

What kind of collaboration are we actually trying to create?

Axis 1: Improving ↔ Renewing

The horizontal axis describes why people collaborate.

On the improving side, collaboration starts with something that already exists. The goal is to make it better, more efficient or more effective. The desired outcome is usually relatively clear.

Move towards renewing, and the future becomes less predictable. Participants collaborate to discover something new: new ideas, opportunities, solutions or even entirely new ways of working.

The distinction is essentially:

Do we want to do something better, or do we want to create something new?

Axis 2: Exchanging ↔ Sharing

The vertical axis describes how deeply participants collaborate.

With exchanging, participants mainly bring something to the table and receive something in return. This could be knowledge, contacts, services, opportunities or referrals. Participants remain relatively independent.

With sharing, participants become more connected. They share knowledge, capabilities, ambitions, responsibilities or resources and invest more strongly in the collective.

The key question becomes:

Are we mainly exchanging value, or are we creating value together?

Combining these two axes gives us four different types of communities.

1. Transactional communities

Exchanging + Improving

Transactional communities are built around exchange. Members participate because there is a relatively clear value proposition: access to contacts, customers, knowledge, services or business opportunities.

A simple business example is a referral network. Entrepreneurs meet regularly, exchange leads and introduce potential customers to one another. Everyone benefits, but the individual businesses remain largely independent.

The design challenge is therefore straightforward: make the exchange valuable, easy and reliable.

2. Functional communities

Sharing + Improving

Functional communities go a step further. Participants work closely together to improve an existing activity, service or process.

Imagine a community of municipalities, software suppliers and consultants working together to improve digital public services. They share expertise, develop standards and coordinate their activities because collaboration produces a better result than everyone working separately.

The design challenge here is: create alignment, trust and clear ways of working together.

3. Exploratory communities

Exchanging + Renewing

Exploratory communities bring people together to learn, experiment and discover new possibilities.

Think of a community of entrepreneurs, AI specialists, researchers and investors exploring how artificial intelligence could create new business models. There is no predetermined outcome. Participants exchange experiences, ideas and perspectives and new collaborations may emerge along the way.

Here, the community should not be over-designed.

The design challenge is: create enough structure for meaningful interaction, while leaving enough freedom for discovery.

4. Entrepreneurial communities

Sharing + Renewing

Entrepreneurial communities combine deep collaboration with the ambition to create something genuinely new.

Imagine a group of companies, universities, government organisations and investors building a regional innovation ecosystem around circular manufacturing. They are not simply exchanging knowledge. They share ambitions, combine capabilities, develop initiatives and invest in a future they cannot create individually.

This requires the highest level of collective commitment.

The design challenge is: turn a shared ambition into collective action without eliminating the entrepreneurial freedom of the participants.

Why the distinction matters

There is no “best” quadrant.

A transactional community is not an immature entrepreneurial community. An exploratory community does not necessarily need to become more integrated. Each form can be valuable when it matches the purpose of the community.

Problems arise when the design does not match the intention.

If you want exploration but manage everything through predetermined KPIs, experimentation disappears. If you want deep collaboration but members only come to exchange business cards, the community will never create collective value.

So before designing events, platforms, governance or membership models, start with a more fundamental question:

What kind of community are we actually trying to build?

That is what the Communities Matrix is designed to make visible.