Product diversification is commonly seen as an expansion strategy firms adopt late within their life cycles. In this article, we elucidate the practice of employing a product diversification strategy from inception. We explore the performance effects of product diversification on newly created nonprofit organizations. Our findings suggest that being diversified from the start-up phase is, while detrimental to organizational efficiency, beneficial for organizational survival. We also find that the revenue strategy employed by the organization moderates the relationship between product diversification and survival. The study offers implications for researchers and practitioners regarding diversification as an entry strategy and performance assessment of new nonprofit organizations.
The main objective of social ventures is the creation of social value. However, these organizations must also generate and appropriate economic value to fund their social valuecreating activities. Mechanisms that enable the alignment of these seemingly contradicting goals are necessary. The authors propose that a participative pricing mechanism known as pay-whatyou-want (PWYW) is capable of aligning a venture's economic and social value creation goals. This mechanism allows customers to determine the price they are willing and able to pay. The authors explain that this mechanism enables social ventures to generate social value through their commercial activities by serving more beneficiaries in need, reducing the stigma of receiving help, allowing non-disadvantaged customers to show support for the social venture, and aligning commercial activities with the social mission, all while ensuring that sufficient economic value is captured to sustain operations.
This article considers the critical role that food bank leaders play in sensemaking around the ethical and justice dimensions of hunger and food-related illnesses in the United States. It presents the discourses of industrial agriculture and food justice and, using an illustrative case study, proposes a preliminary model of ethical sensemaking. This model serves as a starting point for understanding how some (but not all) food bank leaders in the United States have been triggered to engage in ethical sensemaking and adopted a variety of innovative, sustainable, and just approaches to food banking that try to address the root causes of growing levels of hunger in the United States. The article concludes with an invitation to consider this investigation through the lens of Dewey’s moral imagination and Gergen’s forms of inquiry that generate practices to solve social problems and that invite researchers to participate in world-making.
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