Do Government Grants Enable or Constrain Nonprofit Innovation? Longitudinal Evidence Across Institutional Contexts

• In Event: The Public Service Workforce Pipeline: From Recruitment to Performance

Abstract

Innovation has received sustained attention from scholars and practitioners as an important source of organizational adaptation and renewal (Crossan & Apaydin, 2010). For nonprofit organizations, innovation can help address changing service-user needs, respond to dynamic external environments, strengthen organizational effectiveness, and navigate constrained resource conditions (Brimhall, 2021; Levesque, 2020; Richardson & Kelly, 2024). A substantial body of nonprofit research has therefore examined the organizational conditions associated with greater innovativeness. Yet government influence on innovation has received comparatively less attention, despite government’s central role for many nonprofits as a funder, regulator, and policy partner (Ashley & Van Slyke, 2012; Lu, 2015). Government support is not institutionally static: its scale and conditions can change across policy environments, potentially altering the pressures and opportunities nonprofits face. Meanwhile, nonprofits operate under multiple and sometimes competing institutional logics, which shape how organizations interpret and respond to external demands (Park & Mosley, 2017; Skelcher & Smith, 2015). Although prior research has examined how government dependence and institutional logics shape nonprofit adaptation under changing conditions, for example among human service organizations during periods of economic uncertainty (Park & Mosley, 2017), innovation has rarely been examined systematically as a distinct organizational outcome associated with government grant reliance across both nonprofit subsectors and changing policy contexts. We therefore ask: (1) Does reliance on government grants enable or constrain nonprofit innovation? (2) Does this relationship vary across nonprofit subsectors? and (3) Does it change across policy environments?

Author

• Chenxin Zhang, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author