Introduction

Innovative entrepreneurship is considered in a broad range of scientific contributions (Audretsch et al. 2000; Oksanen and Hautamäki 2014) as a fundamental actor for a sustainable smart growth and as a regional advantage. Innovative entrepreneurship’s central role in regional performances is mainly related to its strategic capacity to generate innovations, thus boosting its socioeconomic system (Urbano et al. 2019). These innovative activities allow capturing new technological knowledge and introducing new products and services based on this knowledge (Malerba and McKelvey 2019). As a consequence, healthy rates of both company startups and scale-up processes develop, generating broader economic health. These processes follow different pathways: some companies rely exclusively on organic growth. Others scale up through IPOs (initial public offerings) or through acquisitions of other firms. The organic growth route develops in different ways, since each innovation’s pathway is unique to each company, but there are some common patterns and similarities across companies, mainly in the growth stages and in the strategies implemented. The companies’ various phases usually follow three principal phases: “startup,” “growing to scale,” and “execution and innovation at scale,” with a different set of challenges and milestones (MIT 2015) (Fig. 1.1).