HBS professor Jane Wei-Skillern has been exploring something different: Her research suggests that a more powerful lever to increase a nonprofit's social impact might be to focus on building network relationships like-minded groups—even competitors. Organizations as unique as Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and Women's World Banking (which extends microloans) are deliberately using a network strategy and discovering its potential to serve more people more effectively.
"I'm interested in high performance networks and understanding how those networks were created and are managed," says Wei-Skillern. "A network approach as a deliberate management strategy for nonprofits is still relatively uncommon. Oftentimes an organization might be engaged in a partnership at one point or another, or be a member of an umbrella organization ... but it's not really a network approach that comes into play in the day-to-day operations as a core activity of the mainline business of the nonprofit."
