This paper explores the scalability of local manufacturing in the textile and apparel industry, identifying key challenges and strategic resources in sustainable business models. Utilizing case studies from ten companies, our findings show resource limitations, supply chain efficiency, infrastructure gaps, complexity of product offerings and digital capabilities as crucial for overcoming these challenges. This research contributes to the understanding of scalability of sustainable business models, offering insights for practitioners and guiding future research on local manufacturing.

The literature emphasises that technological advances have enabled firms to expand internationally at accelerated speed. Yet, technological advances are treated as a contextual variable and little is known about how firm-level technological innovations influence the internationalisation speed of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To address this shortcoming, we draw on insights based on capability development theory to establish the effects of innovation timing and pace on SME international expansion speed. We test our conceptual model using a sample of 180 Swedish SMEs and show that the faster the innovation pace, the faster the internationalisation. We then address the boundary conditions of this relationship to show that the elapsed time between a firm's founding and first innovation negatively moderates the positive effects of its innovation pace. Our findings have theoretical, managerial and policy implications.

This paper investigates how the time to a firm's first innovation affects the continued pace of innovation and how the networking behaviour of the firm moderates this relationship. In doing so, the paper develops a relationship among three constructs: time to innovation, pace of innovation, and networking. We draw on resource accumulation theory and network theories to develop our hypotheses, which are tested on a sample of 203 SMEs. The results indicate that the innovation pace of a firm depends on the capabilities developed. By developing innovation capabilities at an early age, firms are likely to drive market changes instead of being challenged by them. Firms that lag in the innovation process can compensate for this by actively networking for resources and capabilities. © 2020 Journal of Innovation & Knowledge