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.

中文翻译：

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非营利组织的外部利益相关者参与和协作创新：类型学和比较分析

非营利组织 (NPO) 越来越多地考虑如何让客户和合作伙伴等外部利益相关者参与进来，以通过创新来适应快速变化和竞争激烈的环境。尽管现有文献提供了利益相关者参与有助于促进组织创新的证据，但大部分讨论都集中在利益相关者识别和管理的自上而下策略上。通过对来自 38 个不同 NPO 的执行董事的深入访谈，我们开发了一种利益相关者参与类型，以捕捉基于数据的方法库，包括：有针对性的反馈寻求、有意探索、工程授权和紧急参与. 调查结果表明这四种方法如何促进 NPO 创新并与 NPO 领导者的信念相关。这种类型学包含紧急参与方法表明，外部利益相关者不仅可以通过参与组织计划的自上而下流程，而且可以在他们认识到新服务或合作伙伴关系的需求或机会时主动提供主动提供的投入，从而推动 NPO 创新。讨论了其他概念含义和实际建议。