The Assessment Paradox: Practices Dissemination and Impact Evaluation
Abstract: Strategy scholars have investigated how cross-sector collaborations (CSCs) promote value creation generating positive externalities to private, nonprofit, and public domains. CSCs commonly promote these externalities through dissemination of practices beyond the primary targets. However, there has been scant attention to inherent tensions that may emerge when CSC partners would like to promote such dissemination and at the same time measure the performance of collaborative efforts. This tension creates what we refer to as the assessment paradox in the context of CSCs. Arguably, allowing for practices dissemination beyond the target units may severely distort the assessment of causal impact if they also increase the performance of untargeted units serving as control groups. To scrutinize the assessment paradox, we develop a set of hypotheses that are tested in the context of a CSC in the Brazilian educational sector. Our econometric analyses confirm our hypothesized mechanism that the learning-side partner (public managers) may have been able to disseminate knowledge beyond the scope of primary collaboration, even without additional external aid by the transferring-side partner (private/nonprofit). We further investigate heterogeneities related to schools’ traits and social networks moderating the effect of knowledge dissemination.
