Cambridge Judge paper on tackling grand challenges wins SMS prize

3 key mechanisms identified 

The winning paper, entitled Propellant organising amid politicised and polarised conditions, identifies 3 mechanisms through which organising by a spinoff entity unfolds to help tackle society’s grand challenges: 

• negotiated infusing of new activities with mission meaning
• calibrating parent-spinoff distance 
• leveraging parent-spinoff differences

“Organisations tackling grand challenges in fragmented, politicised, and polarised environments face a persistent tension: complex problems require dynamic experimentation, yet institutional rigidity constrains organisational change,” says the paper. “Drawing on a 13-year study of an Indian nonprofit, we develop a process model of propellant organising: the strategic creation and orchestration of temporary spinoffs that enable experimentation while preserving parent legitimacy.”  

Helping organisations practically 

The practical implications of the study are 2-fold: 

1. Providing a model demonstrating how organisations can over time sequence experimentation, legitimacy protection and organisational reintegration. 
2. Demonstrating how organisations build and communicate social engagement through different combinations of product, process and profit orientation – as such tools help organisations navigate “competing demands of social innovation, organisational survival and legitimacy preservation”. 

The authors conclude: “Our findings suggest that in restrictive environments, effective organising for grand challenges depends on the capacity to sequence, contain, and relinquish organisational forms as legitimacy conditions shift.”