Scaling Social Innovation Through Cross-Sector Social Partnerships: Driving Optimal Performance

This book is designed to illuminate the features of cross-sector partnerships that make them powerful vehicles to drive social change. Partnerships across market sectors, involving for-profit, non-profit, and government entities, work because they leverage the advantages of each type of organization to arrive at novel solutions to social problems.
Unlike previous work that has discussed cross-sector, multi-sector, or public-private partnerships at a conceptual level, this book scours the existing literature and explores real-life examples to demonstrate the practical characteristics that render these partnerships effective at tackling obstreperous social problems. The authors delve into the key formative features of cross-sector partnerships such as leadership, motivation, cooperative capabilities, and arrive at distinct characteristics that drive performance. The authors lay out a succinct roadmap for creating and maintaining viable cross-sector social partnerships, with instructive real-life examples that highlight how these partnerships can be executed effectively.

Thomas G. Pittz spent over a decade leading social change within nonprofit collaborations prior to transitioning to academia. He now teaches entrepreneurship, strategy, and innovation at the Sykes College of Business at the University of Tampa. His research is broadly focused on external knowledge exploration and exploitation and collaboration across market sectors where diverse knowledge structures can coalesce to produce novel solutions and systemic change.
Melissa L. Intindola is an associate professor of management at Western Michigan University’s Haworth College of Business. She earned her Ph.D. at New Mexico State University in organizational behavior and human resource management. Her research interests include the micro-application of organizational behavior and human resources topics to collaborations of nonprofits, private sector businesses, and public sector government entities.