The following reflections stem from a discussion with Prof. Andrea Bonaccorsi, Full Professor of Management Engineering at the School of Engineering of the University of Pisa, and Massimo Canalicchio, Innovation Manager at Zest, who collaborates with Bonaccorsi as lecturer and mentor of the Master in Scalability promoted by the Universities of Tuscany.
A consistent data point emerges: overcoming the internal cultural limits of Italian companies—both product- and service-oriented—is fundamental to scaling the business and positioning themselves on the market with innovative and successful models.

“The scalability of the business model represents a strategic priority for companies aiming for sustained growth. However, in traditional sectors such as business consulting, design, personal services or the production of industrial components, growth is often hindered by intrinsic limitations. Strategic innovation emerges as the crucial element to overcome these barriers and enable business scaling.” — Prof. Andrea Bonaccorsi.

In many sectors, traditional operating models present limits that hinder replicability and efficiency.

In knowledge-intensive service companies, such as consulting or software development, scalability is constrained by factors such as high customisation, low repeatability, hidden costs, and the slow learning curve of collaborators—often tied to tacit knowledge. Innovation in this field translates into transformation strategies such as:

Productization: Converting a highly customised service into a standardised, repeatable product.

Platformization: Creating a product, often digital, characterised by low access costs. Concrete examples include software platforms that make the client autonomous, reducing consulting interactions, or AI-powered platforms that enable customer autonomy—such as in patent management.

Even in the industrial component sector (e.g., windows, mechanical components), low margins and a sometimes disadvantaged position in the value chain represent significant limits. Innovation enables companies to overcome these obstacles through B2B2C system integration, in-house design, component modularisation, and branding.

In companies producing complex industrial products—such as plants, machine tools, and construction projects—scalability is hindered by high design costs, construction site management challenges, and compliance burdens (e.g., safety, quality, environment). Innovation here takes the form of:

Development of complementary services — Bundling: An approach that enables scalability by adding complementary services to the core product, such as insurance, assistance, or business continuity.

Innovation and Digital Transformation: Strategies include implementing smart operations, remote management, and predictive maintenance.

Innovation is no longer limited to introducing new technologies—it implies a redesign of the business model itself. Key innovative strategies for scalability include:

Modularisation: Essential for both services and products. It consists of adopting a product architecture with standardised interfaces, ensuring that changes to individual components do not require revising the entire structure.

Development of complementary services — Bundling: Particularly relevant for companies producing complex industrial products, where scalability can be achieved by adding services such as insurance, assistance, or business continuity.

Innovation and Digital Transformation: For complex industrial product companies, this includes smart operations, remote management, and predictive maintenance.

In traditional sectors characterised by high human intensity—such as healthcare services, experiential tourism, or retail—scalability limits stem from the need for hi-touch, territorial density, and the potential heterogeneity of service quality. Innovation here focuses on standardisation and brand:

Standardisation and Quality: Strategies like creating detailed operational manuals and using performance and quality standards in staff training help ensure consistency.

Branding: A strong and recognisable brand is fundamental to scalability in these sectors.

Centralised Models: A successful example is a chain of dental clinics using a centralised, scalable model that standardises clinical and administrative processes—ensuring quality and efficiency while maintaining focus on the patient experience.

Even in the consumer product sector—such as household appliances or packaged food—scalability requires systematic innovation. Companies operating in seemingly traditional fields prove how innovation can combine optimised industrial processes (often with sustainability considerations) and artisanal quality (e.g., smart processes to bring Italian gelato worldwide, or circular, traceable fashion enabled by technology).
Typical challenges in these sectors—such as low revenue growth from new products—require heuristics for idea creation and a continuous innovation approach.

Below are some key points on how to design a scalable business model. To achieve this, it is essential to follow a defined process:

Map the Business Model: The first step is to design the current business model in all its components; the Business Model Canvas framework is highly effective for this purpose.

Identify growth constraints: Evaluate, for each sector/business, the critical blocks that hinder scalability—understanding where and why the business does not move beyond ordinary incremental growth.

Select the most suitable scalability approaches: Start from examples and companies that have proven it is possible to overcome limits, and use their experience as inspiration to form scalability hypotheses.

Test through open innovation tools: These are hypotheses, and as such they must be validated or invalidated. Techniques such as Pretotyping and Open Innovation allow testing new business models; when appropriate, developing separate business units becomes necessary to experiment with the “new” to be built.

KPI analysis: Identify, ex ante, success metrics—both financial and learning metrics (number of pivots, lessons learned, etc.)—and monitor the percentage of revenue generated by new products. These are essential steps to assess the effectiveness of innovation.

The strategic innovation approach, through the search for a scalable business, enables sectors that are non-scalable by nature and context to embrace the challenge of the rapid change around us—and understand how to overcome structural limits. The challenge now is to transform tacit knowledge into a repeatable product, low margins into system integration, and service heterogeneity into recognised quality standards.
Every company needs to become “ambidextrous”: developing its core business while simultaneously creating the conditions to run experiments that validate and enable the “new”, which may become its next business model—driving significant and lasting growth.

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Andrea Bonaccorsi is Full Professor of Management Engineering at the University of Pisa.
His work focuses on the economics and management of science, technology and innovation.
He has published over 200 works, including more than 90 articles in leading international journals, with over 14,000 citations.

He is listed in the Stanford University study identifying the top 2% most active researchers worldwide across all disciplines.

He has served as expert and consultant to the European Commission (working directly with Commissioners Geoghegan-Quinn and Moedas, and on the initial establishment of the European Research Council), as well as several Ministries and Regions on innovation policies.

He was a member of the Board of Directors of ANVUR, the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research.
He is Vice President of GATE 4.0, a network of companies coordinating a European Digital Innovation Hub.
He is currently Director of the Master in Scalability, the first programme dedicated to the dimensional growth of companies, promoted by the University of Pisa in collaboration with the Universities of Florence and Siena and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies.