Tipping over to Scalable Growth: Examining Micro-Activities in the Growth Dynamic Capability

Abstract

The importance of versatile resources for firm growth is well documented in entrepreneurship literature. However, how firms navigate nonlinearities in growth and how managers in those firms develop and leverage versatile resources to build growth dynamic capability they can sustain is insufficiently explained. To enhance our understanding of this process, we investigate how individuals in a high growth tech firm overcome the early chaotic new venture growth that led them to the edge of demise – what we term a tipping point - to build growth dynamic capabilities bottom up. Our findings illustrate that growth dynamic capability embodies both intentional and serendipitous actions, as individuals retain useful resources, recombine others, and discard the less useful ones. In this context, repetition is questioned (due to its necessity for scalable growth but also potential to stifle it), and performance reliability at the firm level is continually accomplished via disruptive activities on the individual level.