How do organizations emerge, survive, and scale in resource-scarce environments? Traditional scaling models tend to rely on considerable financial resources and companies often struggle to adjust to diverse contexts. In contrast, we identified and studied an organization in Sub-Saharan Africa that we argue used simple rules to scale bricolage—making the best out of what is at hand—successfully in diverse low-resource contexts. Our paper provides a novel conceptual model of scaling bricolage: a low-cost replication process of heuristics, enabling fit with a diversity of local environments, as well as cross-unit innovation and learning.
