Journal of Business Venturing Special Issue on
Scale-ups, Scaling, and Scalability: Entrepreneurial Scaling in the Digital Age
SI Editors (in alphabetical order): Erkko Autio, Nicole Coviello, Satish Nambisan, Holger Patzelt, Llewellyn Thomas
Submission Deadline: 1 February 2022
In this special issue, we aim to explore how certain firms, behaviors, and capabilities exemplify entrepreneurship: scale-ups, scaling, and scalability. This focus reflects our limited knowledge of the role and nature of scaling, particularly in a contemporary digital context. And, with the tendency to refer to all high-growth firms as scale-ups, what it means to scale has become unclear. Although being ‘scalable’ or having ‘scalability’ are now commonly used terms, these constructs remain poorly defined and, to date, they have not been operationalized nor measured in any meaningful way. Thus, our goals for this special issue are to: 1) stimulate research to address this knowledge gap of theoretical and practical significance for researchers, entrepreneurs, managers, investors, and policy-makers; and 2) unpack if and how scaling firms (and their implications) are distinct from high-growth firms.
We invite submissions from multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. We are open to conceptual papers and empirical studies drawing on any relevant source of data (in-depth interviews, cases, surveys, secondary data, etc.). Comparative studies are of particular interest in order to identify and understand any distinctions between scale-ups and high-growth firms.
Given that international new ventures and ‘born globals’ form an important context to study entrepreneurial scaling, this special issue should be of particular interest to IB scholars.
More details available at: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-business-venturing/call-for-papers/scale-ups-scaling-and-scalability
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Satish Nambisan, Ph.D.
Nancy and Joseph Keithley Professor of Technology Management
The Weatherhead School of Management
Case Western Reserve University