Investigating the relationships between business model archetypes and scaling-up success of social businesses in a developing country

Each social business delivers different products or services to fulfill its mission, culminating in distinctive business model archetypes. Little is yet known about how each archetype achieves the scale and whether they still maintain the social values afterward. Therefore, this paper presents multiple qualitative case studies comprising six social enterprises in Vietnam to investigate their scale-up process. Specifically, the research examines the relationships between three main social business archetypes (SBAs), the selection of scale-up strategies based on Ansoff’s matrix and the level of scale-up success, evaluated based on four aspects, namely customers/members increase, service/offer expansion, revenue increase, and social values maintenance. The findings declare that the interrelations between the archetypes and the strategies are not straightforward, the post-scale social values are still well-respected, and the scale-up success can be assessed from a broadened angle. Nevertheless, future research can garner a larger group of companies with a more comparable timeline to discover patterns that better clarify the relationship between these variables.