Multi-Unit Ownership as an Entrepreneurial Growth Strategy: Toward a Conceptual Framework of Ownership Scaling
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66203/directiva.01205Keywords:
multi-unit ownership, ownership scaling, entrepreneurial growth, organizational replication, resource orchestration, franchisingAbstract
Entrepreneurship research has traditionally conceptualized growth through organizational expansion, emphasizing increases in firm size, revenue, market share, and operational scale. While this perspective has generated substantial insights into entrepreneurial development, it provides limited understanding of how entrepreneurs expand ownership through replicated business units. This limitation is particularly evident in contemporary business systems where growth frequently occurs through the acquisition and coordination of multiple units operating under a common organizational format. Addressing this gap, this article introduces Multi-Unit Ownership (MUO) as a distinct entrepreneurial growth construct and develops the Ownership Scaling Framework to explain how entrepreneurs systematically expand ownership over time. Drawing upon entrepreneurship theory, franchising research, organizational replication, absorptive capacity, dynamic capabilities, and resource orchestration theory, the study integrates previously fragmented perspectives into a coherent conceptual model. The proposed framework conceptualizes ownership scaling as a recursive process consisting of ownership entry, capability accumulation, unit replication, portfolio coordination, and ownership scaling. By shifting analytical attention from organizational growth to ownership growth, the article extends existing entrepreneurship theory, reconceptualizes multi-unit expansion as a distinct growth pathway, and establishes a foundation for future empirical research on ownership-based entrepreneurial growth across replication-oriented business systems.
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