“Missions and Momentum”

This chapter engages founders—aspiring, new, and seasoned—in a simple question: “In a city full of churches, why did we need yours? What’s your product?” Their varied answers to this question fall into three broad frameworks that characterize their assertions about their public benefit and their orientations toward their consumers. Those orientations—client-centeredness, comrade-centeredness, and convert-centeredness—serve as ideal cases for what they claim drives (or in older congregations drove) their belief that they could meet latent demands in their communities. The penultimate section of this chapter describes the difficulty founders have maintaining the vision and values they started their church with, a difficulty exacerbated by the religious ecologies their churches are embedded in and the changing priorities of their spiritually and materially maturing memberships. Like their secular nonprofit peers, churches are vulnerable to mission drift, vision hijacks, and vision stalls.

Predicting Mission Alignment and Preventing Mission Drift: Do Revenue Sources Matter?

Activities of nonprofit organizations do not always align with their missions, a managerial problem termed as “mission drift.” Mission drift is difficult to operationalize and quantify; thus, as a critical issue, only a few conceptual pieces or empirical case studies have explored this topic. This paper develops innovative measures to operationalize “mission alignment” using data science methodology, and examines the impact of revenue sources on mission alignment. By using the cosine similarity of text between a mission statement and program description, four measures of mission alignment are devised: the sum cosine similarity, average cosine similarity, weighted sum cosine similarity, and weighted average cosine similarity. Text analysis indicates that a majority of the programs evidence educational purposes, and for-profit business plays an important role in foundations’ projects and funding. The regression analysis shows that personal donation and service revenue can increase mission alignment,while organizational donation and membership dues decrease mission alignment.

Downward accountability to beneficiaries in social enterprises: do partnerships with nonprofits boost it without undermining accountability to other stakeholders?

The hybrid nature of social enterprises gives them a high potential for developing social innovations, but at the same time leads to tensions within these organizations. The barriers they face to gain access to traditional sources of funding are pushing social enterprises to reinforce their business models and rely more on commercial activities, and this fact increases the risk of mission drift and can weaken accountability towards beneficiaries of the social mission in favor of dominant stakeholders such as funders or clients of the commercial activities. Our research attempts to analyze whether partnerships between social enterprises and nonprofits strengthen accountability to beneficiaries without hindering accountability to other stakeholders, thus allowing both social and economic objectives to operate together. Based on a survey with a sample of social enterprises partnering with nonprofits, results reveal that as the partnership moves along a collaboration continuum to a transformational stage, accountability to beneficiaries is encouraged, whereas accountability to other types of stakeholders is also improved or, at least, not affected.

Organizational hybridity and mission drift in innovation partnerships

PurposeInnovation partnerships are a popular model for organizing publicly supported innovation projects. However, partners often have different timelines and planning horizons, understanding of purpose and concepts of value. This hybridity poses organizational challenges pertaining to trust, goal setting, learning and coordination, which may lead to “mission drift,” i.e. compromising or displacement of intended goals. Despite the risk mission drift poses, its underlying dynamics are not sufficiently understood, and the means to mitigate it are unclear. This study aims to address these questions.Design/methodology/approachThrough eight broad and one deep case study of innovation partnerships funded by Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD), the authors investigate how partnerships reconcile multiple expectations and interests within the IFD framework and how this might lead to mission drift. The authors draw upon existing theories on the organizational challenges of innovation partnerships and supplement these with new empirically based propositions on the risk of mission drift.FindingsThis study identifies a core tension between partnership complexity and the degree of formalization. Depending on how these dimensions are combined in relation to particular goals, the partnership mission is likely to become narrower or more unpredictable than intended. Thus, the authors theorize the significance of partnership composition and requisite formalization for a given innovation purpose.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the theoretical understanding of mission drift in innovation partnerships by opening the organizational black box of partnerships. The findings underscore the value of explorative case studies for specifying the contingencies of organizational design and governance mechanisms for different innovation goals.

Strategic Use of Innovation in High Research Universities: Mission-Driven or Mission Drift? A Comparative Review of the Top 100 International Universities Recognized for Innovation

This research supports some of the mounting pressures higher education practitioners face in approaching innovation strategically while recognizing the mission-driven needs of the institution. Two research questions were examined. First, how do highly innovative universities communicate traditional missions and innovation in their mission statements? Second, to what extent do innovation strategies align as stated in their strategic plans with their mission statements? This research was grounded in institutional theory given the breadth of literature linking this theory to institutional rhetoric such as mission statements. In addition, the theory provided relevancy to assessing the debate over legitimizing tendencies, such as symbolism and signaling, versus more meaningful utilitarian prose. For the research design, the unit of analysis focused on the institutional level, specifically, the Top 100 international universities recognized for innovation by Reuters. Two phases were examined. Before moving into each phase, an interdisciplinary contextual overview was provided to examine geographic, historical, and financial factors on a macro basis. For Phase I, a content review of mission statements was examined for the Top 100 universities as publicly available. Concept and In Vivo Coding was conducted using ATLAS.ti software. In Phase II, a content review examined alignment of mission statements and strategic plans to assess mission-driven or mission drift evidence for select universities identified. Four key findings ensued. First, the trifecta of university missions (teaching, research, and service) dominated mission statement incidence relative to innovation rhetoric. Second, innovation language within mission statements was largely comprised of general phraseology or reference to mission, not beyond mission (or drift). Third, the service component of mission tied to innovation beyond teaching and research was driven by societal influences. Fourth, societally-driven innovation provided the greatest potential for mission drift based on stakeholder perspectives. This research filled several gaps in the literature related to international higher education studies, the intersections of traditional university missions with innovation, and the critical use of ranking systems. It provided a vantage on interdisciplinary uses for ATLAS.ti software beyond the robust coding features, such as geospatial mapping. Resulting recommendations for practitioners focused on mission statement optimization at student, program, and institutional levels, and alignment of strategic innovation with institutional missions. Recommendations for future research addressed the limitations identified as the use of the Reuters ranking system, macro-level analysis, and researcher positionality creating a U.S.-centric interpretation. Specifically, opportunities exist for expanded research studies such as qualitative interviews with stakeholders, longitudinal studies, explorations of additional institutional types through the lenses of other relevant theories (e.g., neo-institutional theory, resource dependency theory, and population ecology theory), and social network analyses given the extent of external actors involved. In conclusion, innovation continues to be hotly contested in the higher education sphere as a mechanism for “high hopes or broken promises” (Chronicle, 2019, p. 59). In the current worldwide climate of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is witnessing higher education institutions rapidly innovate programming and policies in real time as a means to adapt to pressing challenges, and in some cases, to maintain existentiality. It is also at this time, that great emphasis is placed on focusing precious resources on initiatives supporting mission – the intersection of mission and innovation challenges higher education today and will continue to for years to come. Keywords: Higher education institutions, mission, vision, innovation, strategic planning, mission statements, strategic plans, international, interdisciplinary, institutional theory, content analysis, comparative analysis.