Creating Value in Nonprofit-Business Collaborations E-Book

James E. Austin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 430

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Collaboration between nonprofits and businesses is a necessarycomponent of strategy and operations. Creating Value in Nonprofit-Business Collaborations: NewThinking & Practice provides breakthrough thinking abouthow to conceptualize and realize collaborative value. With over ahundred case examples from around the globe and hundreds ofliterature references, the book reveals how collaboration betweenbusinesses and nonprofit organizations can most effectivelyco-create significant economic, social, and environmental value forsociety, organizations, and individuals. This essential resourcefeatures the ground-breaking Collaborative Value Creation frameworkthat can be used for analyzing the sources, forms, and processes ofvalue creation in partnerships between businesses and nonprofits.The book is a step-by-step guide for business managers andnon-profit practitioners for achieving successful cross-sectorpartnerships. It examines the key dimensions of the CollaborativeMindset that shape each partner's collaborative efforts. Itanalyzes the drivers of partnership evolution along theCollaboration Continuum, and sets forth the key pathways in theCollaboration Process Value Chain. The book concludes by offeringTwelve Smart Practices of Collaborative Value Creation for thedesign and management of cross sector partnerships. The book willempower organizations to strategically increase the potential forvalue creation both for the partners and society. Praise for Creating Value in Nonprofit-Business Collaborations:New Thinking & Practice! "This is a playbook for enabling business and nonprofits toco-create shared value. These new types of collaborations aboutcreating value, rather than the tense standoffs of the past, arepart of the way we will create actual solutions to society'schallenges." Michael J. Porter, Bishop William Lawrence University Professor,Harvard Business School "Co-creating value is a powerful concept Jim Austin and MaySeitanidi are sharing with us that will bring business andnon-profit leaders to a new level of understanding and performance.This new book is the indispensable guidebook for leaders of thefuture." Frances Hesselbein, Founding President and CEO of the FrancesHesselbein Leadership Institute, Former CEO of the Girl Scouts ofAmerica, and Holder of Presidential Medal of Freedom "I love the book! While it focuses on "cross sector"collaboration, it should be read by every executive in the"for-profit" sector. Business is about how to collaborate withstakeholders to create value. This book tells you how to do it.Bravo!" R. Edward Freeman, University Professor and Olsson Professor TheDarden School University of Virginia "Finally a book that demystifies what is probably the singlemost indispensable strategy for advancing social change: crosssector collaboration that creates genuine, measurable value forall. The book is an original and valuable resource for both thenonprofit and business sectors, providing a promising new roadmapthat shows how to go beyond fighting for one's share of the pie, tocollaboration that actually makes the pie grow." Billy Shore, Founder and CEO of Share Our Strength and Chairmanof Community Wealth Ventures "Professors Austin and Seitanidi provide essential guidancefor managers determining how to produce benefits for theirorganizations and high impact for society. This is an informed,thoughtful, and practical analysis." Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of BusinessAdministration, Harvard Business School and author of SuperCorp:How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth andSocial Good

Leseprobe

Contents

Figures and Table

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: Collaboration: It’s All about Creating Value

The Rising Importance of Collaboration

Current Limitations in Understanding Value Creation

The Collaborative Value Creation Framework

A Source of Research and Useful Practice

Chapter Two: The Collaborative Value Creation Spectrum

Sources of Collaborative Value

Types of Value

Reviewing the Collaborative Value Creation Spectrum

Chapter Three: The Collaborative Value Mindset

Business Mindsets: Five Central Themes

The Evolving Nonprofit Mindset

Reviewing the Collaborative Value Mindset

Chapter Four: Collaboration Stages and Value Relationships

The Concept of the Collaboration Continuum

Stage 1: Philanthropic Relationships

Stage 2: Transactional Relationships

Stage 3: Integrative Relationships

Stage 4: Transformational Relationships

Reviewing the Collaboration Continuum

Chapter Five: Collaborative Value Creation Processes

Four Phases of Partnership Development

Reviewing the Collaboration Value Creation Processes

Chapter Six: Assessing the Value of Collaboration Outcomes

Why Evaluate?

The Outcomes Assessment Framework

Handling Assessment Perplexities

Reviewing the Outcomes Assessment Framework

Chapter Seven: Twelve Smart Practices for Maximizing Collaborative Value Creation

Twelve Themes

Toward the Future

References

About the Authors

More from Wiley

Index

Praise for Creating Value in Nonprofit–Business Collaborations

“Austin and Seitanidi fill a gaping hole in our understanding of cross-sector partnerships by illuminating what types of value are created in them, how they are created, and who benefits. The book provides a way to talk concretely about real results, and offers strategies for boosting them. With over 100 examples from around the globe, leaders will be able to translate these ideas into action and chart paths to greater impact.”

—Jeff Bradach, co-founder and managing partner, The Bridgespan Group

“This is the most complete analysis on the creation of value in cross-sector partnerships.”

—Bruce W. Burtch, called “The Father of Cause-Related Marketing”

“Companies take note! Finally, you have a solid compass for navigating rich collaborative ventures with nonprofit organizations. The pay-offs will surprise you.”

—Thomas Donaldson, The Mark O. Winkelman Endowed Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

“Austin and Seitanidi’s book offers an in depth and highly systematic account of how value is created in business-NGO partnerships. It is also brimming with case examples that ground the analysis in real-world experience. Scholars and practitioners interested in how partnerships work will enjoy this book’s thorough coverage and rich practical wisdom.”

—Barbara Gray, professor of organizational behavior and director of Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation at The Pennsylvania State University

“Multisector partnerships have been all the rage in CSR for a long time. This book finally moves the debate beyond the hype and provides a detailed analysis of how collaboration between business and civil society can create tangible value for all parties involved.”

—Dr. Dirk Matten, professor of strategy, Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility, Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business, Schulich School of Business, York University

“Collaboration always sounds like a good thing . . . but is it? Austin and Seitanidi provide a thoughtful and accessible answer: collaboration can provide value, and they indicate why and how. The book is particularly welcome as it is both well-grounded and practical.”

—Jeremy Moon, FRSA, professor and director, International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR), Nottingham University Business School

“Cross-sector partnerships have become ubiquitous, but far too often they do not live up to their potential. Austin and Seitanidi have done a huge service to nonprofit and business leaders alike by providing practical insights into how to nurture collaboration in a way that creates less heat and much more light.”

—Mario Morino, chairman, Morino Institute and Venture Philanthropy Partners

“Austin and Seitanidi’s book on partnerships is an excellent and truly welcome input to the understanding and debate about partnerships on an international scale. Both distinguished authors have contributed remarkably to exploring and debating the role of partnerships over the last two decades—way back in a time where partnerships were perceived by many as controversial and long before the ideas of business co-constructing value with governments and NGOs entered the mainstream scene of management theory. The book provides intelligent and reflective thinking for both practitioners and scholars about stages, processes, and outcomes of partnerships but also importantly about the type of mindset for partnerships either to fail or succeed. In particular, I appreciate how important questions are raised about how shared value is constituted collectively and related to the collective’s interests, keeping in mind the advancement of democratic ideals.”

—Mette Morsing, professor, Copenhagen Business School, CBS Sustainability Platform

“This is a timely, informative, and accessible book on business collaboration and partnership. It is relevant and valuable to those studying large firms and small.”

—Laura J. Spence, PhD., professor of business ethics, Royal Holloway, University of London; Section Editor, Journal of Business Ethics

“Austin and Seitanidi provide an innovative and important roadmap to the creation of shared value through collaboration, co-creation, and co-evolution. Indeed, in a world full of wicked problems, this book should prove invaluable to practitioners and scholars alike, as its ideas are theoretically sound yet grounded in collaborative practices of the sort demanded by our complicated future.”

—Sandra Waddock, Galligan Chair of Strategy, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

”Scaling the opportunity of collaboration requires that we unravel the mystery of what makes it smart and effective beyond inspiration and perspiration. The practical research and analysis in this book takes us along this pathway, opening the way to a more systematic approach to success and impact.”

—Simon Zadek, senior fellow, Global Green Growth Institute; senior advisor, International Institute for Sustainable Development; visiting scholar, Tsinghua School of Economics and Management

Cover design by Michael Cook

Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley and Sons. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Austin, James E.

Creating value in nonprofit–business collaborations : new thinking and practice/James E. Austin, M. May Seitanidi.—First edition.

1 online resource.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-118-82442-9 (pdf)—ISBN 978-1-118-82435-1 (epub)—ISBN 978-1-118-53113-6 (cloth)

1. Public-private sector cooperation. 2. Value. I. Seitanidi, Maria May. II. Title.

HD3871

658'.046—dc23

2013047035

To the fellow researchers and nonprofit and business practitioners

whose creativity, talents, and commitment serve to create

collaborative value for individuals, organizations, and society.

May this book honor their past efforts and contribute

to their future progress.

Figures and Table

FIGURES

Figure 1.1

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The Collaborative Value Creation Framework

Figure 2.1

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The Collaborative Value Creation Spectrum

Figure 2.2

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The Value Creation Spectrum: Resource Directionality

Figure 2.3

.

The Collaborative Value Creation Spectrum: Resource Complementarity

Figure 2.4

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The Collaborative Value Creation Spectrum: Resource Nature

Figure 2.5

.

The Collaborative Value Creation Spectrum: Linked Interests

Figure 2.6

.

The Collaborative Value Creation Spectrum and Sources of Value

Figure 2.7

.

Value Creation and Types of Value

Figure 2.8

.

The Collaboration Value Portfolio

Figure 4.1

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The Collaboration Continuum Matrix

Figure 4.2

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Collaboration Continuum Value Drivers

Figure 5.1

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The Collaboration Process Value Chain

Figure 5.2

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The Collaboration Process Value Chain: The Formation Phase

Figure 5.3

.

The Collaboration Process Value Chain: The Selection Phase

Figure 5.4

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The Value Configuration Matrix

Figure 5.5

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The Collaboration Process Value Chain: The Implementation Phase

Figure 5.6

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The Collaboration Process Value Chain: The Institutionalization Phase

Figure 5.7

.

The Elaborated Collaboration Process Value Chain

TABLE

Table 3.1

.

Thirteen Dimensions of the Collaborative Value Mindset

Foreword

Twenty-five years ago—before the era of corporate social responsibility, before the publication of the significant body of academic literature on cross-sector collaboration that this book comprehensively synthesizes and insightfully elaborates—a cold call came in to the corporate offices of the Timberland Company from City Year, the then-fledgling nonprofit.

City Year was launching a corps of fifty young people in Boston to demonstrate the power of national service to unite diverse American youth, solve pressing social problems, and bolster our nation’s democracy. The nonprofit was in search of boots because it wanted to unify its members in appearance and spirit and protect them during physically demanding service projects. Timberland answered the call and donated fifty pair. This in-kind donation began what would evolve into a rich partnership, one that the two of us—as leaders of our two organizations through the most robust years of this partnership—are proud to call, in Jim Austin and May Seitanidi’s language, transformational.

Over the past quarter of a century, more than eighteen thousand City Year corps members in twenty-four cities nationwide have given a year of service in their Timberland boots. At the same time, Timberland, with inspiration from City Year, has embedded a deep ethos of service into the company’s culture, advocating—for its employees and for everyone else—the importance of doing well and doing good.

We have to admit that in the early days of our partnership, we had no rules—no effective framework to guide our collaboration. It was a little like cutting our way through a thick forest, clearing a path to partnership. But even though we had no rules, we did have regular discussions about how to invent the rules. And over time we developed processes and systems for our collaboration. They worked, and our partnership flourished.

But imagine having a road map for a transformational partnership, a map drawn from a rich field of research, a map featuring illustrative examples taken from nonprofit–business collaborations that have co-generated real value for the participating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the companies alike. That road map is what this book provides. Not only does it review the large corpus of literature on the topic of cross-sector collaboration and provide an impressive list of bibliographical resources for readers who want to delve deeper, it also—and this is perhaps more important—finds and fills in or clarifies the blank spots and gray areas in current research and practice. In these ways, this book offers readers a new conceptual and analytical framework, one that, as an outgrowth of the coauthors’ earlier seminal work, is highly applicable to the needs of practitioners. The presentation of this framework is accompanied by vivid examples of company–nonprofit collaborations that illustrate each of the framework’s concepts, and the book includes a superb final chapter that lays out twelve smart practices, based on the framework, for maximizing collaborative value creation.

As we look back over the quarter century of our partnership, the concepts presented in this book ring true to us. To take just one example, we actually did evolve through the collaboration continuum discussed in Chapter Four, moving from the philanthropic phase to the transactional phase to the integrative phase and finally to the transformational phase.

That first gift of boots from Timberland to City Year was philanthropic, but we almost instantly made the transition to the transactional phase. On the one hand, Timberland became City Year’s uniform provider, donating not only boots but all uniform parts and becoming a lead corporate sponsor. On the other hand, City Year led staff service days and diversity trainings for Timberland—City Year’s goal was never just to get a check; from the beginning of the organization, City Year asked its sponsors to get involved, to come out and do service, and to start seeing service as a vehicle for bringing people together.

As our collaboration grew, we were also quick to understand that our partnership was about much more than what each of us could get from or do for the other. And so we moved from the transactional phase to the integrative phase, and somewhere along the way we entered the transformational phase. Jeffrey Swartz joined the City Year board and later assumed the position of chair and helped lead the organization through a period of expansion. Timberland made a total corporate commitment to City Year, directing the vast majority of its philanthropic dollars to the organization. At the same time, Timberland’s unique culture of service began to take root through the company’s very close collaboration with Michael Brown, with his City Year co-founder Alan Khazei, and with their colleagues at the nonprofit. As a result, service essentially became an element of the company’s DNA. For example, Timberland’s Serv-a-Palooza eventually grew into a worldwide day of service across two dozen nations, and the company launched its “path of service,” through which employees are granted paid time off to serve their communities.

Jeff had a vision of building on his grandfather’s breakthrough product (the boots) and his father’s corporate success (the Timberland brand) by adding a unique, powerful, authentic contribution—belief. And soon the boots, brand, belief formula came into sharp focus. It was a powerful formula for a rapidly rising company, and it helped define what an authentic, high-quality lifestyle brand can aspire to and achieve. As for City Year, its transformational partnership with Timberland led to an organizational DNA that has generated a series of transformational corporate partnerships. These have helped to build a dynamic national organization and to inspire an innovative federal program of national service that by its very design requires high-quality nonprofit–private sector partnerships.

The framework presented in this book is a remarkable one. But it represents only one of the many helpful and resonant concepts captured in the pages that follow. For example, one of the most compelling concepts that the coauthors present is the idea of synergistic value, whereby two partners collaborate to produce an innovation that neither could have produced alone. And, indeed, although we are proud of everything that City Year and Timberland have done together over the many years of our partnership, there is no instance of synergistic value that we are more proud of than our having come together to champion the founding of AmeriCorps in the halls of Congress and to help make it possible for more than 775,000 young Americans to date, including City Year’s corps members, to serve their country.

At City Year and Timberland, we have often recalled the inspirational words of Robert F. Kennedy: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Ripples to currents—we are excited to think about the ripples that will be generated by this important book, about the partnerships that will be formed by its future readers, and about the value creation—the currents—for individual enterprises, and for society as a whole, that companies and nonprofits can generate together.

Michael Brown

CEO and co-founder, City Year

Jeffrey Swartz

former president and CEO, Timberland Company

Preface

Over the past thirty years, collaboration between nonprofits and businesses has evolved, in some ways to the point of revolution. Cross-sector collaboration has moved from being a nice thing to do to being a necessary component of strategy and operations. It is difficult to find an important company or nonprofit that is not engaged in such cross-sector collaboration. In the world of nonprofits and businesses, collaboration has become essential to success.

Simultaneously, research into cross-sector collaboration has burgeoned. Its social and managerial importance as well as its conceptual and operational complexity are attracting intellectual attention from a wide range of disciplines throughout the world. Scholars have created international associations focused on this rapidly emerging field of study, and conferences on cross-sector collaboration have proliferated.

Over these last three decades, we have been deeply engaged, as researchers and as authors, in the study of cross-sector collaboration and have interacted extensively with collaborating partners in business and nonprofit groups. The seeds for this book were planted in 2000 with James E. Austin’s publication of the article “Strategic Collaboration between Nonprofits and Business” in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ)1 and with the subsequent publication of his award-winning book The Collaboration Challenge: How Nonprofits and Businesses Succeed through Strategic Alliances.2 Over the subsequent years, both of us have continued to conduct research and to publish on the increasingly complex phenomenon of cross-sector collaboration.

In 2011, the editors of NVSQ asked us to review the cumulative literature on collaboration between nonprofits and businesses, and to ascertain what had been learned since the turn of the twenty-first century. This request led us to conduct an exhaustive examination of the literature, an undertaking that revealed significant advances in collective knowledge of the field along with some equally significant gaps in collective understanding of how value is created in cross-sector partnering. Our immersion in that literature review led us to conceptualize a new framework for thinking about and analyzing value, and we presented our Collaborative Value Creation (CVC) Framework in two lead articles that were published in consecutive issues of NVSQ at the end of 2012.3 The journal’s editors offered the following comments on that work:

Their fine effort [has] yielded much more than a review. From their in-depth and broad examination of the cross-sector collaboration and corporate social responsibility . . . literature they [have] identified various inadequacies in the way value was treated, and consequently they [have] formulated a substantive and important new framing and extension of the current literature . . . Collaborative Value Creation constitutes a central mechanism for addressing complex social issues and for generating multi-value creation leading to societal betterment. In these times of rising needs and diminishing resources, identifying insights into the way value is created, treated, and distributed requires deeper understanding and more systematic research that can lead to a paradigm change of what constitutes value. We believe that these articles will help move us in this direction by stimulating further thinking and investigation in this important emerging field.4

The subsequent positive feedback on those articles that we received from academic colleagues and practitioners, along with the enthusiastic encouragement of our editor at Jossey-Bass, led us to plan and write this book. That process also enabled us to elaborate, refine, extend, and test our original Collaborative Value Creation Framework and to illustrate its features with examples from practice.

We have attempted to make this book particularly relevant and accessible to practitioners while retaining many details of our base research and intellectual work. Nevertheless, the book was not written exclusively for an audience of practitioners. Although it does draw on, distill, and communicate key findings from the rich collaboration literature, it also presents a new conceptual and analytical framework for co-creating value, a framework that managers can apply. To that end, practical applications of the concepts discussed in the book are illustrated by a multitude of examples taken from actual collaborations. The book’s hundreds of references to our underlying research serve as a guide to even more detailed knowledge resources on subjects of particular interest to readers.

In addition, because we recognize that many readers are likely to be collaboration scholars in search of a book to use in their own research or teaching, we have presented a wide range of examples from all over the world. We have also included a set of five questions for reflection at the end of Chapters Two through Seven, with the first three questions intended primarily for practitioners and the last two intended more for scholars and students. The questions invite readers to think about the important new concepts that the CVC Framework puts forward, and about its broader implications for organizations, individuals, and society. In Chapter Seven, the final chapter, we offer a set of twelve guidelines for practitioners in nonprofits and business who are involved in designing and managing strategic cross-sector partnerships aimed at generating ever-higher levels of planned and emergent collaborative value.

Collaboration itself can be empty. The premise of this book is that cross-sector collaborations should be designed and managed to create economic, social, and environmental value for individuals, organizations, and society. In order for those goals to be realized, it is vital that we deepen and broaden our collective understanding and practice of co-creating value.

James E. Austin

M. May Seitanidi

Notes

1. Austin, 2000d.

2. Austin, 2000b.

3. Austin and Seitanidi, 2012a; Austin and Seitanidi, 2012b.

4. Handy, Brudney, and Meijs, 2012, p. 721.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to everyone who contributed to the preparation of this volume. We particularly appreciate the collaboration of Michael Brown, co-founder and CEO of City Year, and Jeffrey Swartz, former CEO of Timberland—both of them pioneers in creating value through powerful nonprofit–business partnerships—for contributing the foreword to this book. At this writing, the enduring City Year–Timberland collaboration is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary.

We also thank a number of our collaboration colleagues, academics as well as practitioners, who enriched our thinking with their comments on our two 2012 NVSQ lead articles (Austin and Seitanidi, 2012a; Austin and Seitanidi, 2012b): Bruce Burtch; Steve Waddell; Professor Andrew Crane; Professor Roberto Gutierrez; Professor Jeff Brudney, Professor Femida Handy, and Professor Lucas Meijs; the NVSQ editors; and a multitude of other collaboration scholars and practitioners from whom we have learned so much, and to whom we have dedicated this book.

For valuable assistance on reference documentation, we thank Urlike Weske, a graduate student at Utrecht University; and Khondker Suraiya Nasreen, a doctoral student at Hull Business School. Thanks as well to María Jesús Barroso Méndez, a doctoral student at Universidad de Extremadura, for her work on the collection of cases.

At the Harvard Business School, we are indebted to Erika McCaffrey, information research specialist, whose impressive skill enabled our exhaustive process of literature review; to Chris Jones, document specialist, for his careful assistance in preparing the manuscript; and to Paula Alexander for administrative support.

We are also grateful to Alison Hankey, senior editor at Jossey-Bass, and her team; and to Alan Venable for editorial support and guidance in the process of developing the manuscript.

Chapter One

Collaboration: It’s All about Creating Value

Businesses and nonprofits collaborate mainly to create new value for themselves or others. Collaboration between these two sectors is now widespread and growing. The strategic question no longer is whether to collaborate but rather how to co-create more value for organizations, individuals, and society. Yet we still lack understanding of where value comes from, how it is generated, what forms it takes, and who benefits. To deepen our comprehension and management of these critical issues for practitioners and academics, this book elaborates the Collaborative Value Creation (CVC) Framework. The framework provides a theoretically informed and practice-based approach to analyzing and creating greater collaborative value.

The Rising Importance of Collaboration

Over the past three decades, the perceived value of collaboration has vastly increased partnering between businesses and nonprofits. As of 2011, 96 percent of the world’s 257 largest nonfinancial enterprises were engaged, on average, in eighteen cross-sector partnerships.1 In 2010, 78 percent of 766 surveyed CEOs in 100 countries confirmed that collaborations “are now a critical element of their approach to sustainability issues” and that they “believe that companies should engage in industry collaborations and multi-stakeholder partnerships to address development goals.”2 The perceived importance is mutual, and the partnering widespread: another 2010 survey revealed that 87 percent of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and 96 percent of businesses consider partnerships with each other important, and that most are engaged in eleven to fifty or more partnerships. A supporting 2012 survey in California of small and midsized organizations found that 74 percent of the nonprofits and 88 percent of the companies were partnering, with over 50 percent of both having more than five partnerships. In Brazil, a study of major businesses revealed that 95 percent partnered with NGOs and made social investments of about $850 million. In Mexico, 61 percent of the nonprofits surveyed collaborated with businesses. A survey of the top 500 firms in Holland showed that 70.1 percent have active relationships with nonprofits. Academic research has amply confirmed that cross-sector partnering is considered essential to implementing strategies for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and to achieving nonprofits’ social missions. Furthermore, it is important to note that collaboration is not size-dependent. It occurs with organizations big and small, and the principles of value creation set forth in this book are applicable to all. In the twenty-first century, cross-sector collaboration constitutes a major leadership challenge across organizations and around the globe.