Generativity and corrosion during scaling: How firms balance core and adjacent ecosystems to enable growth

There is rising theoretical and practical interest in entrepreneurial scaling beyond traditional linear growth models. Recent scholarship highlights ecosystem management as a promising alternative to understand scaling, but it remains unclear how firms can use ecosystem strategies for scaling up, particularly after hitting growth plateaus. Through an in-depth case study of a Brazilian logistics firm based on rich empirical material consisting of 53 interviews and supported by internal documents, this paper investigates how entrepreneurial firms use adjacent ecosystem strategies to overcome growth plateaus and sustain scaling. We introduce the concepts of generativity and corrosion to explain this phenomenon. Our findings reveal that overcoming growth plateaus by scaling through adjacent ecosystems is a dual process: firms must promote generativity by using core assets to create novel value in adjacent markets, while simultaneously preventing corrosion by protecting the mature core from resource competition and misaligned interests. This research provides a nuanced framework demonstrating that successful scaling requires balancing different ecosystem maturities and orchestrating cross-ecosystem synergies.