The missing piece of Political Entrepreneurship
A few weeks ago I had a striking conversation with Ivan Stefunko, one of the founders of Progresívne Slovensko and now a member of the Slovak parliament.
I first interviewed him for my book in 2018, about a year after the party was founded. In the years since, the party has been on a rollercoaster ride; it had great early successes in 2019, supporting Zuzana Čaputová to become the country's first female president, and entering the European Parliament.
But then, to the surprise of many, it failed to enter the national parliament in 2020. The party entered a difficult period and changed its leader several times. Some observers saw Progresívne going the way of many other political startups: failure.
Three years later, however, once again to the surprise of many, Progresívne won 17.96% of the vote in the 2023 national elections, making it the second largest parliamentary party.
And so, Ivan told me on the phone, "there is one piece missing from your framework on Political Entrepreneurship - the one on political scaleups".
From startup to scaleup
In entrepreneurship, a scaleup is a startup that is in the process of expanding. Scaleups have solved some of the initial startup problems, such as market research, product development and identifying a repeatable, scalable business model. What is the equivalent in politics?
In my book Political Entrepreneurship, I have written extensively about the early stages of political startups (from founding to entering parliament). In this blog on Political Intrapreneurship, I have focused on the transformation of established parties. Political scaleups are the missing piece in between.
Unique but not alone
In addition to Progresívne, parties like NEOS in Austria or Momentum in Hungary arguably fall into this category. No longer a political startup, but not a fully established party either. With this stage come unique challenges and opportunities, which I would like to focus on in the coming months.
I am convinced that understanding political scaleups better is crucial for political and democratic innovation - and yet I know that they are under-researched. Their lessons apply not only to political parties at other stages, but also to organisations in other sectors.
This is going to be fun. Will you come along?
