Entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed through a deficit lens, emphasizing constraints such as financial limitations and weak institutions. While recent studies emphasize the potential of high-tech ventures in such settings, we still lack process-based accounts of how these ventures navigate these environments, particularly how their embeddedness unfold over time and how social, spatial and institutional dimensions interact in shaping this process. This study examines how nascent high-tech ventures in sub-Saharan Africa innovate in what we refer to as hyperdynamic contexts characterized by volatility, institutional ambiguity, and fragmented markets to contribute to inclusive regional development. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative multiple-case study our findings contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by revealing that ventures in these contexts alternate between embedding, disembedding, and re-embedding, across different context dimensions. We further demonstrate that digital technologies act as constitutive mediators of blended arrangements. Finally, we advance the concept of ambidextrous embeddedness by showing that ambidexterity is both a critical requirement in hyperdynamic contexts, and an outcome of micro-level recalibration processes over time. Practically, the findings underscore the capacity of high-tech ventures to catalyse innovation and regional development beyond survivalist entrepreneurship.

Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2026.2668350