Reference points for business model innovation in social purpose organizations: A stakeholder perspective

Social purpose organizations pursue dual missions and address heterogeneous stakeholders, which offers them a broad range of opportunities to innovate their business models. In this paper, we identify key stakeholders of social purpose organizations – beneficiaries, donors, customers, employees, partners, competitors, and the government – and use them as reference points to analyze how the business model processes of value creation, delivery, and capture can be innovated. Our analysis identifies the key activities within each value process and the types of actions how social purpose organizations can pursue innovation related to each stakeholder group to expand in scale (impact width) or scope (impact depth). In increasingly competitive and constrained environments, we argue that, by considering the various ways how value can be created for, delivered with, and captured from key stakeholders, business model innovation may have the greatest potential to sustain social purpose organizations and increase their social impact.