Our scale-up definition is the OECD’s definition of a scale-up.
Definition
A company must:
- Have had at least 10 employees (this could be an estimate) in at least one point in time.
- Have a growth rate which exceeds 20%. This is their average annual growth rate.
Background
The definition of an OECD scale-up company is extremely close to what we’ve implemented on the platform. This is the OECD definition (source):
“All enterprises with average annualised growth greater than 20% per annum, over a three-year period should be considered as high-growth enterprises. Growth can be measured by the number of employees or by turnover.”
You can read more about our estimates and average annual growth rates here.
Our growth rate metric adheres to the OECD’s definition, as it necessitates a minimum of three years of data on reported employees or turnover (TO) from annual accounts.
Our estimates and average annual growth rates are used in both the company size definitions and in the scale-up filter. The scale-up filter is located within the growth tab:
Using the OECD’s definition to determine a company’s growth stage enhances the ease of making global comparisons. We’ve removed start-up as the OECD does not provide a definition for a start-up.
We appreciate there are many different definitions of company size and company growth stages, and which one is right for you will depend on the purpose of your analysis.
Our platform still allows for custom definitions using the filters bar, particularly within the financial tab:
