Scaling is a concept that is gaining much attention from academia and practitioners because it points to outstanding performance jointly with resource-conservative strategies. Scaleups significantly impact society because they create employment, help diffuse innovation, and generate value—social and economic—more generally (Belitski et al., 2023).
A firm’s ability to scale may increase significantly via internationalization because access to foreign countries is essential for persistent growth. However, whether companies can benefit from access to larger markets and resources depends on their strategies. For example, strategies based on business model replication, global niche business models, or digital business models, in general, may foster scaling internationally (Tippmann et al., 2023; Reuber et al., 2021; Reuber et al., 2021; Hennart et al., 2021).
One of the underlying characteristics of these scaling strategies is their agility, that is the flexibility and responsiveness to foreign market and customer requests (Hagen et al., 2019). In constantly changing international environments, a nimble and fast response is key.
Jointly with colleagues from four universities, namely the University of Birmingham (UK), Aston University (UK), Université Côte d’Azur (France), and Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences (Austria), we aim to understand international scaling and agile strategies in depth.
Follow us on Agile Lab’s LinkedIn page, where we’ll be sharing updates on this project with the hashtags #InternationalScaling and #AgileGrowth.