Creative Leadership Scale-Up Design
Within the very diverse sample of former THNK participants, “scale-up entrepreneurs” score particularly high on four dimensions: 1) leveraging chance encounters, 2) developing concrete business plans, 3) establishing a risk-taking culture, and 4) setting a high bar. However, they score significantly low on 1) authoritarian traits, 2) self-efficacy, and 3) consistency of interests. How can we interpret those results considering the specific challenges of scaling a triple-bottom-line enterprise?
In September 2017, THNK School of Creative Leadership launched a survey amongst past participants of the Executive Leadership Program to explore how they currently fare on the creative leadership dimensions.
One of our primary research goals was to gain a deeper understanding about the distinguishing leadership characteristics of impact scale-up leaders. We define impact scale-up leaders as those leading an innovative enterprise with large growth potential and substantial societal impact.
So, we asked: Are impact scale-up leaders any different from all other leaders? And how?
We developed a survey which was distributed within the THNK community, made up of 400 leaders living in over 60 countries and on every continent. We are grateful to those who took the time to participate- our survey had a response rate of 50%!