Scale-up Activity in Ontario

Executive Summary

Ontario is home to a vibrant entrepreneurial culture, a critical input to new economic activity. But some of the biggest benefits to our collective prosperity come from the select few companies that achieve the status of high growth, because these “scale-up” companies contribute disproportionately to job creation and economic growth.

While some companies straddle these definitions, many are big revenue generators with a relatively small or slow-growing number of employees, and some may be big job creators with only minimal increases in revenue. We’ve looked at both definitions.

Despite their importance, we know very little about scale-ups. How many are there? What are their job creation impacts? How much do they contribute to province-wide revenue? Where are they? What industries do they belong to? Here’s what we found.