Hybrid entrepreneurship in just transitions: Dealing with dilemmas facing ‘the other’

• Hybrid ventures provide alternative value creation in just transitions for ‘the other’. • Hybrid entrepreneurship enables transitions on communities’ own terms. • Community identity and community embeddedness are essential to alternative value creation. • Spiritual, confessional and cultural values are key leverages for alternative value creation. The aim of the paper is to investigate the role of hybrid entrepreneurship in developing justice and diversity responses to sustainability transitions that are complicated by contexts of ambiguous socio-technological shifts and manifested in material and ethical dilemmas for ‘the other’, i.e., those deemed different. Based on analysis of two original case studies featuring the other—the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation indigenous community in Canada and the Karachi Down Syndrome Program in Pakistan—we identify the conditions for engaging minority communities in strong collaborative and participatory cross-stakeholder processes to deal with dilemmas posed by sustainability transitions. We centre on issues of social inclusion and social equity. We illuminate how hybrid entrepreneurship practices enable, structure and manage collective learning within and outside hybrid ventures to facilitate equitable transitions. Finally, we propose how to co-create actions that amplify marginalized voices to influence institutions.