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This study builds on an existing framework for hybrid ventures, those that emphasize both social and economic goals and outcomes. We examine the relationship between human capital characteristics and hybrid ventures. The sample is drawn from the 2008 and 2009 US Global Entrepreneurship Monitor dataset. Our findings suggest that start-up traditional ventures are characterized by entrepreneurs with previous work experience, that females are more likely to lead an established hybrid venture, and that there is a u-shaped relationship with regard to age in start-up hybrid ventures. The findings also suggest that all entrepreneurial ventures exhibit some degree of hybridness.

From its earliest incarnations, entrepreneurship has been linked to innovation, and often innovations with a societal or social impact. Although classical economists discussed the role entrepreneurs play in handling risk in an economy (Hébert & Link, 2009), perhaps the greater risks have been the social impacts which entrepreneurship brought to societies (Drucker, 1985). The power of mercantile economies like the Phoenician or two thousand years later the British came as much from the new ideas and processes they introduced to the societies of trading partners as from the goods traded.