It is often complicated, but a nonprofit and for-profit can be successfully linked together in a hybrid business model. In some cases, one is a subsidiary of the other, and in other cases the two entities are bound by long-term contracts in which one fulfills a basic need for the other and vice versa.
A classic example of this is the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which in 2005 formed a for-profit subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation, to handle the growth of the Firefox Web browser. Now, the for-profit makes over $100 million in revenue per year, while the Mozilla Foundation handles the development of the open-source software and brings in over $200,000 in charitable donations.
This model works best when the nonprofit’s unrelated business income threatens its nonprofit status, or the for-profit needs help managing its philanthropy.
Hybrid Business Model http://goo.gl/fb/MHqdO #socent