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.