From Founder Knowledge to Organisational Systems: The Founder-to-System Translation Model for Scaling Expert-Led Online Education

In expert-led online education organisations, the founder's knowledge, methods and professional judgement often form a central component of the educational product. When teaching, assessment and decisions remain concentrated in the founder, this concentration can limit growth and make quality dependent on one person's availability. Research on tacit knowledge, codification, organisational routines, delegation and quality assurance offers complementary explanations of this problem, but their integration into an operational framework for expert-led online education remains insufficiently developed, particularly where the founder remains actively involved. This conceptual paper asks how a founder's expert knowledge can become an organisational system that allows growth while preserving quality. It develops the Founder-to-System Translation Model (FSTM), an integrative framework that draws on Natseva's work on founder authority and founder-led governance in online education and on established research on knowledge transfer, organisational routines and decision rights. The FSTM describes six interrelated processes: articulation of founder knowledge, codification, operational translation, delegation, quality control and scalable delivery. For each process it specifies the object of transfer, the vehicle, the executor, the scope of independent decisions, the quality check and the escalation threshold. The model distinguishes documented knowledge from usable organisational capability and treats escalation to the founder as a diagnostic signal rather than a failure. The paper illustrates the model with contextual information from Happy Life Academy, discloses the author's relationship with that organisation, and formulates six research propositions. The FSTM has not been empirically tested. The illustration does not validate it, and the propositions are offered as untested assumptions for future research.