The expansion of commercial subsidiaries under Malaysian public universities (IPTAs) reflects a strategic shift toward financial sustainability and market responsiveness within higher education. These hybrid entities operate at the intersection of bureaucratic public-sector requirements and demanding entrepreneurial commercial needs, creating unique leadership challenges that demand both decisiveness and institutional alignment. Despite increased scholarly attention toward university commercialisation, limited research has explored the leadership capabilities required to generate speed and direction under such constraints. This conceptual paper introduces leadership velocity, the capacity to execute rapid strategic action while remaining aligned to institutional mission, as a central construct explaining performance outcomes in Malaysian IPTA subsidiaries. Integrating insights from institutional theory, hybrid organisation research and strategic leadership studies, the paper proposes a conceptual framework wherein four leadership capabilities, political skill, entrepreneurial orientation, structural flexibility and ambidextrous mindset, collectively enable leadership velocity, which subsequently drives subsidiary performance. The model further suggests that the strength of institutional hybridity moderates this relationship, such that leadership velocity becomes increasingly critical under high bureaucratic-commercial tension. By advancing leadership velocity as a theoretical lens, this paper contributes to the understanding of how leaders can navigate speed under constraint in hybrid higher education ventures and outlines future research directions to empirically validate the construct.