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The purpose of this paper is to explore why innovative service ecosystems scale up, using a service-dominant logic lens. The focus is on identifying the key drivers of the scaling-up process as the basis for a new conceptual framework on the scaling up of service innovations.

An inductive research design is used to zoom in on two innovative service ecosystems, Eataly and KidZania, to identify the key drivers that can explain why innovations scale up. For both companies, the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, archival sources and in-store observations is used as complementary data sets. Multiple investigators and multiple coders have been involved in the data collection, coding process and analysis.

An extended conceptualization of service innovation is obtained, grounded in a framework of four drivers of scaling up: effectuation as the basis for creating the value proposition; sensing and adapting to local contexts; the reconfiguration and alignment of resources and forms for collaboration between actors; and values’ resonance.

This study represents one of the first empirical investigations of the key drivers of the scaling up process of service innovations. The paper contributes with a conceptualization of service innovation and why scaling-up processes emerge, emphasizing the existence of multiple constellations of four drivers.

Despite increased attention to, and investment in, scaling up of disaster risk reduction (DRR), there has been little detailed discussion of scalability. The purpose of this paper is to respond to this critical gap by proposing a definition of scaling up for DRR, what effective scaling up entails, and how to measure and plan for scalability.

A literature review of debates, case studies and good practices in DRR and parallel sectors (i.e. education, health and the wider development field) unveiled and enabled the weighting of key concepts that inform scalability. The mixed methods research then developed, validated and employed a scalability assessment framework to examine 20 DRR and five non-DRR initiatives for which a minimum set of evidence was accessible.

Support from national, regional and/or local authorities strongly influenced the scalability of all initiatives assessed. Currently, insufficient to support effective scaling up, monitoring and evaluation were also found to be critical to both identify potential for and measure scalability.

The paper ends with a scalability assessment and planning tool to measure and monitor the scalability potential of DRR initiatives, highlighting areas for corrective action that can improve the quality and effectiveness of DRR interventions.

This multiple case study research aims to identify the characteristics of scaling up SMEs in Chile for exploring how and why some entrepreneurship in the information technology (IT) sector are able to scale up and develop sustainable strategies, based on three consecutive years. The average sales of the companies during the last period analysed was around US$1,323,579, with an average annual growth rate of 66.7%. Scaling up SMEs may require several attributes to achieve positive revenue and develop effective high growth rates that allow them to succeed over several years.

To discern the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, the methodology of multiple case study research was conducted in three parts. The first was to define and design the research process, in which the study should settle the theory analysis and then show that research propositions and questions. The second part of the research was to prepare, collect and analyse the data through crafting instruments and data collection protocols as a source of evidence to conduct the pilot and multiple case study. In this stage, interviews were scheduled, transcribed, analysed and coded to explore how individual attributes may create a scaling-up entrepreneurial process for maintaining or developing high performance in the IT sector. The last part of the research concludes and validates the research propositions for the identification for potential attributes, which were obtained during the qualitative study.

Attributes were selected when 13 or more SMEs reported the importance of this initiative for the process of scaling up their SMEs. As a result of the data analysis, the empirical findings suggest on the importance of the academic background, budgetary control, negative entrepreneurial experiences, building teams, geographical expansion and first critical experience as key attributes for scaling-up. Additionally, the data propose that constructive entrepreneurial ecosystem and reforms financing markets and programmes are two additional components that could moderate the interaction between the scaling-up process and the achievement of rapid sales results as a key outcome measure.

The first limitation was the lack of consensus on the phenomenon of the scaling up of entrepreneurship. Information in Latin America and emerging countries is scarce, which also represents an opportunity for other researchers to deepen and validate the results reported here. Even though it was an attempt to understand the issue of environmental change, this additional limitation did not allow the evaluation of these adjustments over time that can positively or negatively drive the strategies corresponding to the evolution in each of the moderator variables.

Because of the characteristics of the sample in terms of size of the SMEs, industrial sector, location, culture, socio-economic environment and years of establishment of the company, the study cannot be generalised in terms of other industrial sectors or countries. The results of this research are also limited to SMEs in Chile, and to the extent that it can be applied to emerging countries IT sectors with similar sample characteristics, it must be done so with caution. Yin states that eight cases “are sufficient replications to convince the reader of a general phenomenon”.

Policymakers have the option to identify what skills and knowledge the entrepreneur requires to be trained to scale up their established ventures. In this context, they will also benefit from the empirical contribution of knowing what the restrictions that limit this process are, such as adverse tax systems and public strategies. Additionally, it is of public interest because no national records exist on the presence of theoretical terms.

Even though the literature promotes the present findings, it shows that there is an absence of empirical evidence in emerging economies to better comprehend which factors may affect the development process of scaling up entrepreneurship in the IT sector. Both deliberate and emergent strategic initiatives are necessary for the scaling-up process where six critical factors are the basis of the scaling-up. This empirical contribution for entrepreneurs will support the achievement of rapid and sustained sales results for scaling up their ventures.

The scaling up of promising, innovative integration projects presents challenges to social and health care systems. Evidence that a new service provides (cost) effective care in a (pilot) locality can often leave us some way from understanding how the innovation worked and what was crucial about the context to achieve the goals evidenced when applied to other localities. Even unpacking the “black box” of the innovation can still leave gaps in understanding with regard to scaling it up. Theory-led approaches are increasingly proposed as a means of helping to address this knowledge gap in understanding implementation. Our particular interest here is exploring the potential use of theory to help with understanding scaling up integration models across sites. The theory under consideration is Normalisation Process Theory (NPT).

The article draws on a natural experiment providing a range of data from two sites working to scale up a well-thought-of, innovative integrated, primary care-based dementia service to other primary care sites. This provided an opportunity to use NPT as a means of framing understanding to explore what the theory adds to considering issues contributing to the success or failure of such a scaling up project.

NPT offers a framework to potentially develop greater consistency in understanding the roll out of models of integrated care. The knowledge gained here and through further application of NPT could be applied to inform evaluation and planning of scaling-up programmes in the future.

The research was limited in the data collected from the case study; nevertheless, in the context of an exploration of the use of the theory, the observations provided a practical context in which to begin to examine the usefulness of NPT prior to embarking on its use in more expensive, larger-scale studies.

NPT provides a promising framework to better understand the detail of integrated service models from the point of view of what may contribute to their successful scaling up.

NPT potentially provides a helpful framework to understand and manage efforts to have new integrated service models more widely adopted in practice and to help ensure that models which are effective in the small scale develop effectively when scaled up.

This paper examines the use of NPT as a theory to guide understanding of scaling up promising innovative integration service models.

The purpose of this study is to identify the business strategies that entrepreneurs have formulated to establish the business with the intention of scaling up in the information technology (IT) sector in Chile, given that they have managed to scale up sustainably at an average annual rate of 73.3% and an average annual employee growth rate of 37% for four consecutive years after an establishment period of 25 months.

Three methodological steps were used to identify which strategic initiatives are relevant to the establishment of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on the path to scaling up. The first part consisted of identifying the literature and defining the research propositions and research questions. The second part was to prepare, collect and analyse the data to conduct the research by applying, transcribing, reviewing and coding the sources of evidence to explore how SMEs are able to develop strategic initiatives for the start-up process. The final stage was to validate the research proposal to identify potential strategic initiatives identified during the multi-case study.

As a result of the data analysis and empirical findings, three deliberate strategic initiatives were identified: staying engaged with customers, delivering successful business solutions and articulating social capital. However, in crisis situations, entrepreneurs readjust their strategies based on their management skills and an emergent strategic initiative was identified as securing the financial structure and revolutionising change. While this research was not designed to identify personal attributes, it did highlight the importance of adaptation and learning as a skill to drive the business model for scaling up during the establishment of their business.

It is clear that the study focused on Chile and cannot be replicated in other regions or sectors due to the characteristics of the sample itself, but it provides empirical evidence that there are cycles prior to scale up that need to be understood. The findings were empirically validated during the establishment phase, but the deliberate and emergent strategic initiatives that consolidated the SME to prepare for its scale-up process are not evident in the theory.

The IT sector will continue to grow and change after the pandemic, and the global economy will use more digital systems, creating new ways of working with the use of IT. This context will impact on SMEs where strategies, whether deliberate or emergent, will need to be part of the new business models, and therefore, caution should be exercised when using the results of this study. Public and private institutions should educate and guide entrepreneurs for the potential scaling up of their SMEs without having to wait 42 months, according to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2021-2022 (Hill et al., 2022). Scaling up can begin as early as 25 months after establishment, breaking the paradigm of the theory that the SME must be established in a period of 3.5 years. This period cannot be generalised as business opportunities in the IT sector are faster. The research also contributes by reporting that contingency planning is relevant during the establishment phase.

Educational institutions and the public sector have made efforts to change business cultures regarding the importance of strengthening entrepreneurship, but teaching the emergent strategies that often challenge SME creation is not yet widespread in educational formats. This is a challenge not only for institutions but also for entrepreneurs trying to anticipate the constant changes in the global economy. This research provides an opportunity to create more dynamic business models with more conscious risk planning.

Although the literature has confirmed the findings, this research has provided a pre-scaling picture that links these two important stages on the axis of deliberate and emergent strategies. The findings confirm the importance of correctly embedding five strategic initiatives for the establishment of the SME if it is to continue on its journey towards business scale-up. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence in emerging economies on how entrepreneurs have found the right path to scale-up.

To ensure that more people will benefit from integrated care initiatives, scaling-up of successful initiatives is the way forward. However, new challenges present themselves as knowledge on how to achieve successful large-scale implementation is scarce. The EU-funded project SCIROCCO uses a step-based scaling-up strategy to explore what to scale-up, and how to scale-up integrated care initiatives by matching the complementary strengths and weaknesses of five European regions involved in integrated care. The purpose of this paper is to describe a multi-method evaluation protocol designed to understand what factors influence the implementation of the SCIROCCO strategy to support the scaling-up of integrated care.

The first part of the protocol focuses on the assessment of the implementation fidelity of the SCIROCCO step-based strategy. The objective is to gain insight in whether the step-based strategy is implemented as it was designed to explore what works and does not work when implementing the scaling-up strategy. The second part concerns a realist evaluation to examine what it is about the SCIROCCO’s strategy that works for whom, why, how and in which circumstances when scaling-up integrated care.

The intended study will provide valuable information on the implementation of the scaling-up strategy which will help to explain for what specific reasons the implementation succeeds and will facilitate further improvement of project outcomes.

The expected insights could be useful to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of future scaling-up strategies to advance the change towards more sustainable health and care systems.

Our understanding of the strategies that lead to the success of start-ups when they scale-up is limited when it occurs at the regional periphery. The main purpose of this study is to explore the specific strategies that start-ups employ to scale-up, specifically in contexts with high resource constraints at the regional periphery.

Analyzing the data from personal in-depth interviews with engineering and science start-up founders in peripheral regions of upstate New York USA bordering the Canadian Ontario, we explored a combination of internal and external strategies that start-ups employed to scale-up.

The study found that start-ups prioritize building internal scaling capacity in their human capital, organizational structure, scalable business model, finance and business ownership. To foster the scaling process further, start-ups develop new effective external strategies that target the business environment.

Policymakers and regional governments can use our research to develop more effective industrial policies for supporting start-ups’ growth and subsiding strategic industry clusters for rebooting new competition policy, which is a current debate in many industrialized economies including the US. This targeted regional industrial policy is specially needed when scaling-up at the regional periphery.

Our study is specially need it when scaling-up at the regional periphery and with limited resources.

This study enriches our understanding of the growth of start-ups and small ventures by providing context-based insights into how firms build the capacity to scale-up in highly challenging and uncertain business environments in a peripheral bordering region between the USA and Canada. It also offers useful managerial and policy implications.

This paper seeks to examine the strategies social enterprises can use to scale up their impact. A traditional view has been for growth to occur through expanding operations or setting up new sites owned by a single organisation. However, a range of other strategies of scaling impact outside of organisational boundaries is explored.

The paper is based on an analysis of one detailed and three less intensive case studies of social enterprises in the early years sector supporting children and families. These were selected purposefully to represent a cross section of types of organisation. In the detailed case study, interviews were conducted with ten nursery managers, four of the senior management team and other key stakeholders.

This paper examines alternatives for scaling up social impact ranging from maximising the impact internally (through new activities, and more sites) to growth beyond the confines of the organisation (through social franchises, use of kite marks, training and networks).

The paper proposes a framework to help define the strategies by which organisations can scale up their social impact. The potential impact grows when considering scaling though partnerships, relationships and dissemination of ideas, but with this increase in scale, there is a loss of control by the original innovator. The research is of value to organisations wanting to scale up and for policy makers wanting to identify suitable strategies for encouraging growth and replication.

For firms that depend on personalized management as a key element of their competitive advantage, maintaining personalized management in the face of sustained growth presents a particular challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms in the Germanic Mittelstand have endeavored to “scale up” personalization.

Different ways of scaling up personalization are explained with examples.

The concept of personalization need not just concern customers, in contrast to conventional treatments of personalization. Mittelstand firms illustrate the scaling up of personalization to target stakeholder groups other than just customers.

In recent years, personalization has come to refer to the customization of products to the preferences of individual customers. In contrast, a neglected but important topic is personalization of and within firms. Personalization refers to imbuing a firm with the personal qualities of individual personalities indissociable from management of the company.

Methods for scaling up personalization need to be truly scalable to be effective. Methods that only enable a one-time enlargement in the scope of the personalized business are liable to fail in the longer run.

By examining personalization as an important characteristic of small to medium-sized firms that they wish to maintain as they grow larger, this study highlights a little noticed dimension of Mittelstand growth strategies – and endeavors to bring personality back into research on “personalization.”

The purpose of this paper is to provide new insights into barriers to sustaining and scaling-up housing and community-care innovations related to changing the long-term care (LTC) system.

Two housing and community-care experiments were studied. The 11 barriers and four core themes identified to the scaling-up of these experiments were analysed using the three theoretical concepts from the transitions literature: shielding, nurturing, and empowering innovations.

The barriers included shielding through subsidies without having organizational or political commitment, nurturing networks that underestimated the size of the housing and community-care innovations, and a failed empowerment because of regulatory uncertainty – not knowing the rules of tomorrow and ignoring the reality that it takes time to spread the lessons learnt in experiments.

Housing and community-care innovations need to pay less attention to subsidies and focus more on learning from the experiments, spreading the ideas, and creating commitment from policymakers so that the innovations become empowered.

Empirical insights into the barriers to sustaining and scaling-up housing and community-care innovations into the LTC system are provided and propositions for future transition programmes formulated.