Leadership for global impact ::explore or exploit while scaling?

Scaling research has hitherto uncovered "surprisingly little about how strategic leaders reconcile the opportunities and challenges associated with scaling" (Jansen et al., 2023: 597), and particularly, how to balance exploration versus exploitation (Rosing, Frese, & Bausch, 2011). To address this question, we re-think the classic "crossing the chasm" approach that recommends to focus on exploiting the identified product/market solution (Moore & McKenna, 1999). We rather propose to differentiate who is exploring and exploiting, leadership or employees. Preliminary results from >300 Swiss SMEs support the notion that exploration by employees may not be helpful when scaling. However, we also find that exploration by leadership is positively associated with growth in scaling firms. Overall, this study challenges extant assumptions and indicates that "putting all eggs into one basket" (Moore & McKenna, 1999) may need to be re-thought in order to enable firms to move from local to global impact.