Service Innovation in a Voluntary Organization : Creating Work Opportunities for Severely Developmentally Disabled Adults

Current literature on the developmentally disabled indicates they represent a large untapped labor pool that is significantly inhibited in its inclusion in the community. To address this unnecessary isolation, a voluntary agency in Georgia, wanted to innovate its service offering by providing meaningful work opportunities for those that are severely developmentally disabled. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) offers a theoretical framework that has been adapted to explain many business factors in addition to organizational effectiveness. Based on a fourteen-month action research engagement, the authors adapted CVF to concentrate on organizational focus, strategy formation and motivational traits to understand service innovation in a voluntary organization. The authors aided the voluntary organization’s development of a program to provide meaningful work opportunities for those that are severely developmentally disabled, added new knowledge on managing service innovation in voluntary organizations and adapted CVF for understanding and guiding service innovation in that particular context