EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Four Ways to Scale Up: Smart, Dumb, Forced, and Fumbled

Bent Flyvbjerg

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Scale-up is the process of growing a venture in size. The paper identifies modularity and speed as keys to successful scale-up. On that basis four types of scale-up are identified: Smart, dumb, forced, and fumbled. Smart scale-up combines modularity and speed. Dumb scale-up is bespoke and slow, and very common. The paper presents examples of each type of scale-up, explaining why they were successful or not. Whether you are a small startup or Elon Musk trying to grow Tesla and SpaceX or Jeff Bezos scaling up Amazon - or you are the US, UK, Chinese, or other government trying to increase power production, expand your infrastructure, or make your health, education, and social services work better - modularity and speed are the answer to effective delivery, or so the paper argues. How well you deal with modularity and speed decides whether your efforts succeed or fail. Most ventures, existing or planned, are neither fully smart nor fully dumb, but have elements of both. Successful organizations work to tip the balance towards smart by (a) introducing elements of smart scale-up into existing ventures and (b) starting new, fully smart-scaled ventures, to make themselves less dumb and ever smarter.

Date: 2021-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.11104 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2101.11104

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators (help@arxiv.org).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2101.11104