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This article explores a variety of ways employees are being engaged as social innovators in their companies or as co-creators in partnerships with other businesses, NGOs, and/or government agencies. They are engaged as intrapreneurs in company innovations contests, in partnerships with external social entrepreneurs, and in pro bono global service programs, and as members of innovation teams in organization-wide innovations. The study compares and contrasts four employee engagement platforms and assesses their impact on participating employees, companies, and communities from these efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study focuses on Fair Trade USA (the leading third-party certifier of fair trade products in North America) and founder, President, and CEO Paul Rice and his challenges scaling FT USA. The case study covers the growth strategies that he and his team are debating at a key point in FT USA's history amidst increasing competition from other certification organizations like Rainforest Alliance and Utz and general market confusion over consumer packaging labels. Rice and his team are grappling with how to make the Fair Trade USA label more prevalent as well as how to build a viable, long-term business model. The case discusses FT USA's role in helping companies like Hershey's develop sustainable supply chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social entrepreneurs navigate a complex landscape of legal structures in which they need to select among for-profit, nonprofit, and mixed-entity structures. This study of 48 hybrid organizations identifies why social entrepreneurs chose one legal structure over another and explains what motivates half of them to change their legal structure as they build their enterprise. It highlights the critical desire for flexibility among social entrepreneurs, discusses the implications that changes to legal structure may have for companies and hybrids in partnerships, and explores how companies can leverage hybrid structures to go beyond their current scope of CSR initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing recognition that hybrid organizations can play a critical role in tackling intractable global sustainable development challenges. At the same time, acute social, environmental, and economic challenges are opening up "opportunity" spaces for hybrids. Different institutional contexts are also leading to variable hybrid forms linked to the focus of their mission and their profit-oriented status. This article presents a process for identifying, mapping, and building impact indicators based on a study of 20 hybrid organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on people excluded from traditional markets as employees, producers, or consumers on the grounds that they lack the appropriate skills. It describes the processes through which these perceived liabilities can be overcome by so-called hybrid organizations. Hybrids pursue explicit social missions through business-inspired earned-income strategies, with the express goal of creating market disequilibria. This article demonstrates the challenges hybrids face and outlines how to overcome them by identifying hidden complementarities and creating new ones, by eliminating the need for complementarities, and by creating demands for antagonistic assets, or by using partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid organizations pursuing a social mission while relying on a commercial business model have paved the way for a new approach to achieving societal impact. Although they bear strong promise, social enterprises are also fragile organizations that must walk a fine line between achieving a social mission and living up to the requirements of the market. This article moves beyond generic recommendations about managing hybrids in order to highlight a typology of social business hybrids and discuss how each of the four proposed types of hybrid organizations can be managed in order to avoid the danger of mission drift and better achieve financial sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue on hybrid organizations defines hybrids, places them in their historical context, and introduces the articles that examine the strategies hybrids undertake to scale and grow, the impacts for which they strive, and the reception to them by mainstream firms. It aggregates insights from the articles in this special issue in order to examine what hybrid organizations mean for firms and practicing managers as they continue to grow in number and assume a variety of missions in developing and devel-oped countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations with social missions, such as nonprofits and social enterprises, are under growing pressure to demonstrate their impacts on pressing societal problems such as global poverty. This article draws on several cases to build a performance assessment framework premised on an organization's operational mission, scale, and scope. Not all organizations should measure their long-term impact, defined as lasting changes in the lives of people and their societies. Rather, some organizations would be better off measuring shorter-term outputs or individual outcomes. Funders such as foundations and impact investors are better positioned to measure systemic impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]