Strategic partnerships, social capital and innovation: accounting for social alliance innovation

Abstract

This paper focuses on innovation in the context of business–non‐governmental organization (NGO) partnerships for corporate social responsibility (CSR). While different aspects of business–NGO partnerships have been studied, the role of innovation and its potential implications for partnership outcomes have so far not been systematically explored. The paper defines innovation in simple and concrete terms and synthesizes from the literature what can be considered as critical ingredients to foster social alliance innovation. The paper posits in turn that these ingredients correspond closely to the conception of social capital and offers a consolidated framework that helps in probing around these ingredients and social capital in accounting for innovative partnership outcomes. The empirical part consists of a comparative analysis of six case studies of business–NGO collaboration in the context of CSR in the United Kingdom. The evidence presented makes it clear that strategic partnerships are more readily capable of innovation and that social capital as an umbrella concept is very promising in explaining the differential success and performance of social alliances and central to understanding the dynamics of social alliance innovation and value creation.

Lessons for Responsible Innovation in the Business Context: A Systematic Literature Review of Responsible, Social and Sustainable Innovation Practices

“…• Innovation system with NGOs [78]; creating more impact with NGOs [79] or social alliance innovation [92] • Experts…”

“…However, it is also important to deliberate with stakeholders who can contribute to the actual development of the innovation. In these cases, deliberation also serves to enhance understanding about the actions and commitments of each stakeholder for the development of the innovation [96], and how their interests can be aligned with the overall objective of the collaboration [43,85,92].…”

Lights and Shadows of Business-Nonprofit Partnerships: The Role of Nonprofit Learning and Empowerment in this Ethical Puzzle

“…Another possibility consists of analyzing sustainable innovation as a result of BNPP, an under-researched topic. Only a few theoretical or mainly case-study based works have specifically examined this issue [16,[80][81][82][83].…”

“…However, new forms of collaboration that extend the simple roles of donor and beneficiary are emerging as a consequence of sectorial blurring. A number of studies have outlined the existence of different types of partnerships according to their position along a 'collaboration continuum' [2,3,[16][17][18]. One of the best known models is the so-called 'collaborative value creation' framework [2,3], which identifies four basic categories of partnerships, i.e., philanthropic, transactional, integrative, and transformational partnerships.…”

The Effects of Social Capital on Innovation Performance: From Complex Adaptive System Perspective

“…Recently, there is a wide feeling of agreement that innovation performance depends not only on market or technological determinants, also on organizational social capital through networks of interaction and learning (Pérez-Luño et al, 2011;Martínez-Cañas et al, 2012). Although there are several empirical and theoretical studies on the relationship between organizational social capital and innovation performance (Jamali et al, 2011), research on the relationship between organizational social capital and innovation performance from the CAS perspective is limited.…”