As with all new ventures, in the face of ongoing organizational and environmental pressures, social ventures must consider large-scale business model change. However, changes of this magnitude inevitably expose the ventures to risks of compromising their social mission. Prior studies on organizational hybridity have focused on the smaller operational, personnel, and governance changes, which help to continuously deliver social and financial value while presuming the stability of the ventures’ business models. In doing so, these studies have overlooked the opportunities of more foundational business model shifts for sustained organizational hybridity. To address this omission, the current study asks 1) How do social ventures change their business model to address ongoing challenges to hybridity? and 2) Why do social ventures differ in their approach to such business model change? We answer these questions by drawing upon 129 interviews with 51 leading social ventures in nine Asian countries. Our findings offer a novel theory of ‘social venture pivoting’, in which we show how ventures differ in business model attributes related to beneficiary inclusiveness and value integrativeness, and how entrepreneurs interact with these attributes to ensure the mission’s continuity in business model change, thereby sustaining organizational hybridity. Our emergent model contributes to the research on the governance of organizational hybridity by demonstrating strategic changes as a means to sustain hybridity, revealing the importance of enacting change-continuity duality to sustain hybridity, and highlighting a hybrid governance mechanism rooted in entrepreneurs’ engagement with their business models.
