Making Sense of Hybrid Business Entrepreneurship - An Empirical Framework

Studies regarding entrepreneurial activities that deliver active value creation beyond pure financial goals (i.e., also including a social and/or ecological bottom line) face abundant terms and definitions, often with little common ground or theoretical foundation. The present paper seeks to remedy this problem by delivering an empirically grounded framework of constituents and characteristics of hybrid entrepreneurship based on 18 case studies. We employ a problem-oriented grounded theory method to clear the field of redundancies and misunderstandings and deliver empirical insights that provide practitioners and researchers with a long-due framework for analysis. Moreover, we move beyond merely defining hybrid business entrepreneurship by instead carving out typical unifying characteristics from in-depth observation that allow for further theoretical consolidation.