This paper contrasts the characteristics of Virtual Teams and Online Communities with regard to their potentials for fostering Open Innovation Management. We develop scenarios to illustrate the potentially most effective usage for Virtual Teams and Open Innovation Communities in an enterprise and analyze how discontinuous innovations are developed in an open company environment. Core values, which should be taken into account when creating and operating a community effectively, will be identified and classified. To enhance and transfer our findings, we used semi-structured explorative interviews with practitioners engaged in the field of Innovation Management.