Balancing financial, social, and environmental values: can new ventures make an impact without sacrificing profits?

What drives entrepreneurial action to create a lasting impact? The creation of new ventures that aim at having an impact beyond their financial performance face additional challenges: achieving economic sustainability and at the same time addressing social or environmental issues. Little is known on how these new hybrid organizations, aiming for multiple impact dimensions, organize and prioritize for their social, environmental, and financial goals.
A dataset of 4,125 early-stage ventures is used to gain insights into how blended values are converted into financial, social and environmental impacts, giving shape to different types of hybrid organizations.
Our findings suggest new hybrid organizations might opt to sacrifice financial impact to achieve social impact, yet this is not the case when they aim to generate environmental or sustainable impact. Therefore, the tensions and sacrifices related to holding blended values are not homogeneous across all types of new hybrid organizations.