Abstract:

This paper demonstrates that hybrid entrepreneurship is not universally transitional. The paper argues that under institutional voids, it becomes a rational and intentional long-term (permanent) entrepreneurial configuration. Drawing from 32 semi-structured interviews with professionals in Nigeria, this paper challenges the temporal assumption of hybrid entrepreneurship by introducing synergy entrepreneurship, a variant of hybrid entrepreneurship that describes how professionals in resource-constrained institutional environments strategically maintain primary employment while leveraging institutional credentials, professional networks and specialised expertise to engage in informally coordinated, need-based entrepreneurial engagements that serves dual economic and social missions. Taken together, this study introduces a conceptual framework based on five propositions that constitute a dynamic model in which institutional failure generates individual adaptive response (P1), which activates a trust-network economy of episodic service provision (P2). Public institutions then passively exploit without compensation (P3), anchoring individual professionals are anchored to sustain through a multi-layered lock-in (P4), the net effect of which is improved service outcomes that suppress the reform pressure that would address the underlying institutional failure (P5). The most significant theoretical contribution of the study concerns the indivisibility of economic and moral motivations in synergy entrepreneurship. This moral-economic coupling constitutes a distinct entrepreneurial logic, neither purely commercial nor purely social, but a synthesis in which the commercial and social dimensions are mutually constitutive. The model as presented is inductively grounded in a specific institutional context (the Nigerian public professional sector) as experienced by educated, mid-career to senior professionals with established social and professional networks. This research also advances broader theoretical debates in entrepreneurship and management scholarship. The contingency framework developed in this study addresses an ongoing conversation about contextualising entrepreneurship theory in institutionally void environments.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: African Studies

Keywords: Entrepreneurial process & other spatial/temporal issues on African entrepreneurship. ;Culture, alternative institutions and indigenous African networks.

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Dr. Egena Ode