Pathways to Scaling International Impact: Exploring Capabilities in B Corps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the rising global awareness of sustainable development issues, hybrid ventures have increasingly brought their solutions across borders to scale their impact internationally. Yet, prior research has largely concentrated on international scaling undertaken via sales growth for economic goals. We instead offer an elaborated conceptualisation of international impact scaling, which includes internal growth, partnership, and dissemination downstream and upstream in the value chain. Stemming from prior research that views capabilities as critical ‘firm-specific advantages’ for international expansion, we investigate which capabilities hybrid ventures leverage when scaling impact internationally and to what extent they differ across scaling strategies. We adopt a qualitative method to analyse seven B Corps, a type of hybrid venture whose impact is certified. The findings reveal three clusters of foundational capabilities that B Corps leverage irrespective of the specific scaling strategy adopted, alongside a range of targeted capabilities that are specifically important to each international scaling strategy. The study contributes to international scaling research and the literature on hybrid ventures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".