Abstract:
As firms rapidly lose dynamism beyond the early stage, resolving their growth bottlenecks has emerged as a critical policy priority. Empirical analysis shows that successful scale-up is closely tied to R&D investment, AI adoption, and exports in manufacturing, whereas brand strength and design capabilities are key drivers in services. This highlights the limitations of single-track, R&D-centric support and the greater effectiveness of coordinated policy mixes based on firm-specific growth bottlenecks. Achieving this requires pivoting toward a more effective model-one that brings scale-up programs under integrated management and overhauls the performance evaluation framework.