Nonprofits' external stakeholder engagement and collaboration for innovation: A typology and comparative analysis

Abstract Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) increasingly consider how to engage external stakeholders, such as clients and partners, in their efforts to adapt to the fast‐changing and highly competitive environment through innovation. Although the existing literature offers evidence that stakeholder engagement can help promote organizational innovation, much of the discussion focuses on top‐down strategies of stakeholder identification and management. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with executive directors from 38 different NPOs, we developed a typology of stakeholder engagement to capture the repertoire of approaches grounded in data including: targeted feedback seeking , intentional exploration , engineered empowerment , and emergent engagement . Findings demonstrate how these four approaches contributed to NPO innovation and were related to NPO leaders' beliefs. This typology's inclusion of the emergent engagement approach suggests that external stakeholders can drive NPO innovation not only by participating in organizationally planned top‐down processes but also by offering unsolicited inputs proactively when they recognize the need or opportunity for new services or collaborative partnerships. Other conceptual implications and practical suggestions are discussed.