Triple Chasm
Explainer Videos

92% of startups fail within three years. So what separates the other 8%? As we all know, what works for one business doesn't necessarily work for another.

20 years ago, we set up a research group in Cambridge to track the growth of different businesses. And we found that every company had key moments where their growth stalled. We set about collating more data and identified a number of factors that every business should be considering when planning growth. And so our scale-up framework was born.

There are so many priorities that a company needs to focus on, but not all of the priorities are important at the same time. In the very early stages, you need to get several basic things right. You need to have the right team. You need to play to your strengths and make sure that you have people around you that are also playing to their strengths, and are complimenting you. The other one is to establish the direction of your business, that you're not picking up this kind of scatter gun approach where you're all over the place with what you're trying to do. The third aspect you need to get right is does anybody care about what you're doing? Because if nobody cares then there isn't really a route or support. The most difficult part of the journey is an all-encompassing kind of problem, and that's ultimately leadership, and it means a lot of things. The responsibility to determine where you're going, how you're going to get there, and how do you build the right team and lead them to get there?

We identified three different types of customers at the three different chasms, which can be summarised as follows-- At Chasm I, we have prototype customers. At Chasm II, we have charter customers. And at Chasm III, we have the mainstream customers.

We look to a model first created by NASA for their space missions. They set out nine Technology Readiness Levels or TRLs. We modified these slightly and refer to our levels as MTRLs. We integrated the MTRLs with the Triple Chasm Model so that companies could see where they are on their commercialization journey.

Interviews with Scale Up leaders on the importance and relevance of external vectors.