Start-up Scale-up: Addressing the Manufacturing Challenge for Start-ups
This chapter looks at a new but related problem: start-up scale-up. There is an additional and compounding innovation gap problem affecting start-ups that need to manufacture their products. While the advanced manufacturing institute model detailed in the previous chapter addresses innovation at large, midsize, and small manufacturing firms, to date it has largely focused on existing firms and has not encompassed new entrepreneurial start-ups. These start-up firms face not only an early-stage technology development gap, but also a production scale-up gap. Start-up scale-up is a problem in general, and particularly for manufacturing start-ups. This third category of firms, then, comprises the start-up and entrepreneurial firms that manufacture products based on their own new innovative technologies, typically emerging from university research centers.