Scaling up collaboration for social impact: the governance and design of corporate-nonprofit partnerships

Fit for solving the grand challenges? From organization design choices to ecosystem solutions

“…Recent research provides some powerful examples: Parente et al (2019) examine how a Chinese state-owned MNE enters and sustains operations in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in Central Africa by engaging in collective action and coevolving with key stakeholders within its business ecosystem; Gatignon (2022) investigates partnerships between non-profit and profit firms when engaging in supply chains for food in humanitarian situations and uncovers the need for task interdependence to facilitate organizational learning; Busch and Barkema (2022) find orchestration of networks is required in the scaling of social enterprises in the Sub-Saharan African emerging economy context; and Tatarinov et al (2022) show how United Nations (UN) organizations assemble the cross-sectoral ecosystems of digital solutions as these scale internationally. Such models rely on each individual organization's ability to adapt their decision-making processes and be open to collaboration with other types of organizations.…”

“…While many organizations claim that responsibility and purpose are high on their agendas, different organization designs provide unique opportunities and challenges to this kind of problem-solving. Scholars as well as practitioners increasingly call for cross-sector collaboration (Quelin et al 2017;Stadtler 2018;Gatignon 2022) and, more recently, ecosystem-based approaches (Tatarinov et al 2022) for addressing the grand challenges. However, without a clear understanding of organization design choices across the various sectors, such collaborations are unlikely to succeed and a framework for the effective use of organization designs will be difficult to create.…”