A Resource-Based View on Organic and Acquired Growth

Abstract

While the social sciences do not make “scientific discoveries” of the kind made in the natural sciences, the empirical patterns revealed in Tables 1a and b struck us as coming close to that. Consider especially the “organic as percent of total” columns. They show an astonishingly clear and strong relationship between the size class of firms and the proportion of total growth that is organic. The effect is actually so strong that large firms defined as “high growth” in terms of total employment growth actually shrink quite markedly in organic terms (cf. Davidsson, 2005, p. 153; Davidsson & Delmar, 2006).

Citation

McKelvie, A., Wiklund, J. and Davidsson, P. (2006), "A Resource-Based View on Organic and Acquired Growth", Wiklund, J., Dimov, D., Katz, J.A. and Shepherd, D.A. (Ed.) Entrepreneurship: Frameworks And Empirical Investigations From Forthcoming Leaders Of European Research (Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 175-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1074-7540(06)09007-6