Hybridity in Non-profits: Innovating for Social Value Creation

Non-profits face rising pressure to secure funding and innovate for increasingly complex social problems, while cognizant that failed innovations could produce consequential societal harm. In a longitudinal case study, we apply a social innovation lens to examine how a non-profit experiments with hybridity. Applying such a lens foregrounds mechanisms of social value creation, capture and distribution and reveals how non-profits can move beyond managing tensions and instead look to reframe hybridity as innovation. Our study, based as it is in social innovation, brings a focus to organizational dynamics and processes and reveals how organizational responses to hybridity occur in mission and operations and, importantly, in strategy. This reconceptualization of hybridity makes a theoretical contribution in bridging literature on hybridity and social innovation, anchoring in management and strategy. It also makes a significant empirical contribution in reconceptualizing hybridity for practitioners and in showing how hybridity may then be viewed not as a threat to non-profit values and traditions and not as an ongoing tension to resolve, but rather as a process to innovate and amplify social value and impact.