Mobilizing Multiple Actors for Social Innovation: The Role of Relational Engagement

Abstract: Through a 32-month inductive qualitative study, we explore how Green City Force (GCF), a small under-resourced not-for-profit organization, successfully initiated and sustained collaborations with public, not-for-profit, and for-profit partners to produce new solutions to long-standing social and environmental issues. They did so by nurturing relational rather than transactive engagement between diverse partners. We define relational engagement as the commitment of partners to collaborate with GCF beyond the original resource sharing agreement in order to produce social innovations. This process made partners feel part of a collective project of social change, thus leading them to commit to the long-term timeframe required to create social impact. GCF was able to sustainably engage partners through three key practices. First, it delineated a flexible collaboration scope which triggered the engagement of partners with diverse interests in the collaboration. Then, partners’ engagement was translated into relational engagement and maintained over time through two complementary practices: nurturing dialogical conversations that generated and sustained partners’ relational engagement in the collaboration over time and organizing catalytic events, which reinforced partners’ relational engagement by creating a shared experience and providing tangible evidence for GCF’s impact. Our paper contributes to the literature on collaboration and social innovation by showing how organizations can successfully orchestrate collaborations with diverse partners. It highlights the role that small grassroots organizations can play in the production of social innovation and suggests that they are more likely to succeed at doing so if they move away from transactive interactions and towards relational engagement with their partners.

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The paper is co-authored with Anne-Claire Pache (ESSEC).