Scaling-up social enterprises: The effects of geographic context

Social enterprises implement business-like approaches to address social problems. Scale-up of these enterprises beyond one geographical context can extend their impact to better match the scope of problems being addressed. Unfortunately, many social enterprises start but relatively few expand to new contexts, making scale-up one of the most important but least understood outcomes of social entrepreneurship. We explore this outcome empirically, extending existing research that is predominantly conceptual. The study adopts a multicase study research design. A dynamic capabilities framework reveals how resources are amassed and configured for expansion, a process that can be more difficult for social compared to commercial enterprises. Findings suggest scale-up may be a second act of social entrepreneurship because dissimilarities between initial and scale-up contexts necessitate product modification, different partnerships, and idiosyncratic resource configurations. We thus call into question existing literature’s focus on standardization – generic resource configurations – for scaling-up social enterprises to new geographical contexts.