Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

A crucial aspect of the scaling of companies is that many of their key metrics scale sublinearly like organisms rather than superlinearly like cities. This suggests that companies are more like organisms than cities and are dominated by a version of economies of scale rather than by increasing returns and innovation. This has profound implications for their life history and in particular for their growth and mortality. As we saw in chapter 4, sublinear scaling in biology leads to bounded growth and a finite life span, whereas in chapter 8 we saw that the superlinear scaling of cities (and of economies) leads to open-ended growth.