Study title

Social tech ventures, which combine technological innovation and commercial trade to address social challenges, hold immense promise for creating scalable, cost-effective solutions to pressing global social problems. Despite their potential, research on social tech ventures remains nascent, particularly concerning how these ventures develop, scale, pivot, and manage mission drift. Existing studies primarily focus on non-tech social ventures or commercial ventures, leaving critical gaps in understanding the unique dynamics and developmental processes of social tech ventures. This project explored how social tech venturing unfolds. It focused on how social tech firms develop their mission, as well as how they develop their commercial and social elements as they evolve. It aimed to uncover how they adapt over time and when the market environment changes. Due to ethical concerns the data cannot be shared, but the interview protocols are made available.The world is facing many social problems. Social entrepreneurship offers the promise to be an important tool in the fight against them. Social tech ventures, which leverage technology and trade commercially to address social problems, are particularly promising in this regard: by offering technologically-mediated solutions to social problems, they have the potential to help a larger number of beneficiaries at lower costs than their non-tech counterparts. Existing research about social entrepreneurship has shown that social ventures need to carefully combine the two aspects that are at the core of their hybrid nature: i.e., their social and commercial elements. In addition, research has found important ways by which social ventures can deal with this challenge, such as by integrating these two elements in the organization or segregating them in different parts of it. Despite its strong merits in recent years, this literature overlooks how the distinct type of social tech ventures develop to deliver their mission at...