What Drives Impact Scaling? The Roles of Resources, Innovation Performance, and Sustainability Orientation

ABSTRACT The literature on sustainable entrepreneurship calls for a deeper understanding of how to scale impact, particularly as large‐scale solutions are essential to addressing today's grand challenges. Drawing on self‐collected survey data from 97 Polish impact startups, this paper investigates the roles of resource availability, innovation performance, and sustainability orientation in scaling impact. Building on the resource‐ and knowledge‐based view and threat rigidity theory, we propose a moderated mediation model and empirically demonstrate positive effects of knowledge resources on innovation performance, which subsequently enhances impact scaling. Interestingly, a startup's sustainability orientation is found to play an ambivalent role in the resource–innovation–scaling relationship. While it negatively moderates the link between knowledge resources and innovation performance, a positive effect emerges in the innovation–scaling connection. This paradox suggests that the more sustainability entrepreneurs face trade‐offs related to sustainability, the less willing they are to invest in innovation. Our findings hold important implications for both researchers and practitioners.