Chapter 6: Cooperative Capabilities

Our findings show that the performance driver of cross-sector social partnerships (CSSPs) that is most utilized in practice and discussed in scholarship is cooperative capability. Cooperative capabilities are defined as the ability to think creatively to devise new ways to address problems (Page, 2010), or the ability of the partnership to think critically. Specifically, the CSSP must be able to consider alternatives beyond that which each partner has tried individually. Dahan, Doh, Oetzel, and Yaziji (2010) posited that cross-sector social collaborations are useful for co-creating new and innovative business models and scholarship has highlighted the importance of collaboration’s leaders to maintain an open mind in seeking new solutions (Sun & Anderson, 2012). CSSPs must be comfortable seeking out new skills with which they are not familiar, whatever they may be. Other scholars have referred to this as a type of bricolage (Ritvala, Salmi, & Andersson, 2014), or the piecing together of unique skill sets to bring these to bear on a problem in a previously unforeseen solution. As one may expect, the ability of a partnership to explore unique alternatives to seemingly intractable problems is related to other factors, namely (a) trust in the partnership, (b) prior collaboration experience, (c) the ability to recognize needed resources – and thus resource constraints, and (d) fostering a culture of teamwork. These factors are supporting variables of the partnership’s ultimate degree of cooperative capability.