Details
Year: 2020
Published in: Journal of Business Research.
Cited as: Siebold, N. (2020). “Reference points for business model innovation in social purpose organizations: A stakeholder perspective.” Journal of Business Research.
Abstract
Social purpose organizations pursue dual missions and address heterogeneous stakeholders, which offers them a broad range of opportunities to innovate their business models. In this paper, we identify key stakeholders of social purpose organizations – beneficiaries, donors, customers, employees, partners, competitors, and the government – and use them as reference points to analyze how the business model processes of value creation, delivery, and capture can be innovated. Our analysis identifies the key activities within each value process and the types of actions how social purpose organizations can pursue innovation related to each stakeholder group to expand in scale (impact width) or scope (impact depth). In increasingly competitive and constrained environments, we argue that, by considering the various ways how value can be created for, delivered with, and captured from key stakeholders, business model innovation may have the greatest potential to sustain social purpose organizations and increase their social impact.
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Future Research
1. Future research at the individual level could investigate the motives of each stakeholder and, on the organizational level, scholars could examine which forms of stakeholder integration within the social purpose organisations (SPO’s) business model is most effective for strategic or personal reasons.
2. Researchers could explore the various combinations of actions that key stakeholders (beneficiaries, donors, customers, employees, partners, competitors, government) and value processes (value creation, value delivery, value capture) yield.
3.In particular, a relevant research question for scholars concerns the specific outcomes of actions and their combination, investigating which ones are most effective in, for instance, increasing benefits for individual beneficiaries, diversifying income streams, growing the organization, and increasing the SPO’s overall social impact.
Policy Makers
In increasingly competitive and constrained environments, this article argues that, by considering the various ways how value can be created for, delivered with, and captured from key stakeholders, business model innovation may have the greatest potential to sustain social purpose organizations and increase their social impact. E.g. effective integration of beneficiaries in the workforce and value delivery process.
Social Entrepreneurs
1.This study shows that social purpose organisations (SPOs) can integrate beneficiaries productively as a part of their workforce in the value delivery process.
2.This study also shows that particular business model innovations (BMIs) are related to stakeholders such as donors, customers, partners, or competitors. For instance, SPOs may target better-positioned donors to mobilize recurrent monetary or in-kind donations or invite them as private or corporate volunteers in the value delivery process.