How Hybrid Organizations Turn Antagonistic Assets into Complementarities

This article focuses on people excluded from traditional markets as employees, producers, or consumers on the grounds that they lack the appropriate skills. It describes the processes through which these perceived liabilities can be overcome by so-called hybrid organizations. Hybrids pursue explicit social missions through business-inspired earned-income strategies, with the express goal of creating market disequilibria. This article demonstrates the challenges hybrids face and outlines how to overcome them by identifying hidden complementarities and creating new ones, by eliminating the need for complementarities, and by creating demands for antagonistic assets, or by using partnerships.