Abstract
Digital social innovations (DSI) are new products, services or processes either embodied or enabled by digital technology, whose goal is to stimulate social change. Like social ventures, DSIs are hybrid organizations (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Bonina et al., 2020). Hybrids operate in severe institutional voids environments (Mair, Marti and Ventresca, 2012; Austin et al., 2006) and need to respond to a variety of different stakeholders, making them highly risky. Because DSI rely on ground-breaking technologies, they are perceived as even riskier. Although high risk demands entails greater returns, we still lack an understanding of what risk is in a hybrid context and how it unfolds. This paper seeks to answer the following research questions: What are the risks of hybrids developing DSIs?