Brain Circuits

Are you practicing the three key steps to scaling up?

by Alfredo De Massis, Silvia Sanasi Published August 25, 2026 in Brain Circuits • 3 min read

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Less than 5% of new ventures succeed in scaling up. Here’s how to get it right, and a checklist to keep you on the path to growth.

Three key steps

Our research on three fintech scale-ups revealed that they succeeded thanks to their ability to interpret information and share that understanding across the business through the following practices:

1. Scoping: Identifying new opportunities

Scoping practices help identify which trends, customer feedback, regulatory shifts, or competitive moves are relevant for scaling and which to ignore. The most successful firms in our study built mechanisms to coordinate internally, share insights, and keep up with evolving market conditions.

2. Interpreting: Sensemaking signals

Once trends are identified, firms must interpret them by investing heavily in practices that encourage dialogue, reflection, and sensemaking. This could involve collecting relevant data to support scaling efforts, implementing monitoring systems to track user behaviors, or identifying patterns relevant to customer acquisition that signal untapped or emerging needs. This ability to turn scattered feedback into coordinated organizational action is central to a venture’s interpretive capacity.

3. Enabling: Making interpretation actionable

Interpretation only matters if it informs action. Enabling practices ensure that new insights about user behavior, trends, or product offerings are visible and utilized across the entire organization, informing hiring, resource allocation, product development, and market-entry decisions. Organizations must also focus on their governance of information flows and decision-making processes by building internal structures, such as cross-functional teams and bridging roles that support the continuous gathering, interpretation, and diffusion of external knowledge.

Use this checklist to make sure you are on the right path to scaling:

1. Do we create spaces for interpretation (not just execution)?
2. Are we staying open-minded to new market segments and products?
3. Are we gathering external data and using it (however ambiguous) to question decisions over new and existing products or services and test new concepts?
4. How do we encourage internal dialogue about trends, signals, and their implications?
5. Do these signals and the resulting discussions guide our decision-making?
6. Is our growth accompanied by appropriate governance at every stage?

Key takeaway

By embedding interpretation in their daily practices, successful ventures cultivate interpretive capacity as a collective, distributed organizational process that supports their scaling efforts.

Further reading:

How to scale your business and become an outlier venture

How the Mulliez family built a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem

Beyond survival: What business leaders can learn from necessity entrepreneurs

Sustaining an Entrepreneurial Spirit in Your Family Business

Authors

Alfredo De Massis

Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Business

Alfredo De Massis is ranked as the most influential and productive author in the family business research field in the last decade in a recent bibliometric study. De Massis is an IMD Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Business at IMD where he holds the Wild Group Chair on Family Business and works with other universities worldwide.

Silvia Sanasi

Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at the University of Bergamo and a member of CYFE

Silvia Sanasi is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at the University of Bergamo and a member of CYFE. She also teaches at Politecnico di Milano Graduate School of Management and USI Università della Svizzera italiana.

She serves as Representative-at-Large for the Academy of Management’s SAP interest group and as Associate Editor for Creativity and Innovation Management, and sits on multiple editorial boards. She earned her PhD (cum laude) from Politecnico di Milano in 2022, with award-nominated research on business model experimentation, and previously held roles at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and LMU Munich.

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