An organization’s capacity to bring its resources and skills together and deploy them advantageously, thereby forming the identity of the organization by defining what strategies they are good at doing.
Published in Chapter:
Thriving Within the Turbulence: A Complexity Theorizing Approach to Social Innovation by Nonprofit Organizations
Rachel Taylor (Federation University, Australia), Nuttaneeya (Ann) Torugsa (Mahidol University, Thailand & University of Tasmania, Australia), and Anthony Arundel (The United Nations University – Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), The Netherlands & University of Tasmania, Australia)
Copyright: © 2019
|Pages: 26
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-6301-3.ch003
Abstract
This chapter embraces complexity theory as a basis for theorizing social innovation in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) operating in the Australian disability sector, which is currently grappling with the implementation of a disruptive policy reform leading to a paradigm shift in the funding of disability support services, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). To cope and thrive within a new NDIS-fueled marketplace, disability NPOs need to pursue socially innovative agendas. Through a review of cross-disciplinary literatures on social innovation and the use of a complexity theorizing approach that integrates multiple theories (i.e. institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and user innovation theory), this chapter proposes a holistic complexity-based framework that can potentially: explain how disability NPOs develop social innovations operating at the edge of chaos, help improve the ability of research to tackle societal and managerial problems, and hence strengthen management scholarship.