Navigating Paradoxes and Multiple Institutional Logics in Creative Startups

Entrepreneurs in the cultural and creative industries face the unique challenge of merging artistic vision with commercial objectives. These individuals, who manage businesses in areas such as art, design, and media, must balance creative expression with the need for financial sustainability. Thus, conflicts arise from multiple institutional logics, as creative logics emphasize exploration and experimentation, while commercial logics focus on refinement and profitability. Managing these competing demands creates organizational tensions, particularly under resource constraints, and mirrors a dilemma observable across many sectors. The cultural and creative industries thus serve as a microcosm for all hybrid organizations facing conflicting institutional logics and paradoxical tensions. Paradox theory provides a valuable framework for understanding these dynamics, showing how contradictory yet interdependent elements can coexist within organizations. By addressing both sides of the paradox simultaneously—rather than making trade-offs—organizations can harness both creative and commercial poles, fostering resilience and innovation. This dissertation investigates how creative entrepreneurs navigate these paradoxical tensions between artistic and commercial demands. Through a multi-level analysis, it examines the influence of individual orientations, team dynamics, and organizational strategies on ambidexterity as a paradoxical construct, innovation and adaptation processes. More specifically, by focusing on three levels—individual, team, and organizational—this dissertation addresses the complex interplay between paradoxical constructs such as creativity and commercialization, and exploration and exploitation, which define the challenges of hybrid ventures. The first study adopts a quantitative approach to explore how founders’ creative and business orientations interact to influence innovation, providing insights into how early decisions shape a venture’s long-term trajectory. The second study uses qualitative methods to examine interpersonal dynamics within founding teams, focusing on how social interactions foster ambidexterity, enabling teams to balance creativity with commercialization. The third study offers a longitudinal qualitative analysis of how hybrid organizations adapt their business models to reconcile the competing demands of artistic and commercial logics. Collectively, these studies examine the navigation of paradoxical tensions from these interconnected perspectives and under which conditions it results in innovation. As such, this dissertation contributes to the literature on creative entrepreneurship, hybrid organizations, and paradox theory. In particular, this dissertation highlights the importance of individual orientations and team dynamics in fostering innovative outcomes and ambidextrous capabilities while demonstrating how continuous organizational adaptation is essential for long-term success.