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The aim of the study is to examine the effects of opportunity creation and discovery on the performance of family firms. Specifically, from the tenets of dynamic capabilities and organizational contingency perspectives, this study proposes and tests a framework of how family firms' creation and discovery behavior impact venture growth and the conditions under which such impact can vary.

The study uses moderated-hierarchical regression to analyze survey data from 156 family-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating within a sub-Saharan African economy.

The findings indicate that creation behavior has a curvilinear U-shaped relationship with venture growth, while discovery behavior has a direct positive relationship with venture growth. Further analysis reveals that the curvilinearity of the U-shaped relationship between creation and venture growth will be stronger for older family firms than for younger ones.

The study findings may be limited by the cross-sectional nature of the data and the specific focus on family firms only.

The results highlight the significance of pursuing both opportunities among family firms. In fact, both creation and discovery opportunities are significant drivers of family firm growth, albeit in different capacities. Relatedly, managers of older family firms (compared to younger firms) can invest more in exploiting creative opportunities.

From these findings, governments and other stakeholders should create enabling environment and institutional frameworks conducive to exploiting opportunities by entrepreneurial firms.

The study is novel – as it provides unique findings on the performance implications of creation and discovery behavior of entrepreneurial family firms within developing economies.

This paper aims to examine the growth rates of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) over a three-year period, the relationship between firm size and firm growth in the context of SMEs, and the effect of marketing capability (MC) on firm growth and how it relates to firm size. The theoretical framework is based on the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities.

Data were gathered from Finnish SMEs (n = 214) and analyzed with Latent growth curve modeling (structural equation modeling). Respondents were chief executive officers or company owners.

Results show that firm size is unrelated to the rate of change, and MC has a significant effect on both the intercept and slope parameters. Smaller SMEs have less MC than larger SMEs.

While the overall human resources level of the SME is not linked to the rate of growth, MC is. This is an important point for small business growth studies, for it shows what type of personnel is called for during rapid growth. SMEs could advance significantly and rapidly if they invest in versatile human capital, especially in the marketing area.

Majority of the MC research involves larger corporations. This study brings new insights from SME perspective. In addition, this study suggests that it is imperative to consider different types of growth separately. This study contributes to this need by demonstrating the connection between employee growth rate and MC in SMEs.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between gender, innovation and growth in Italian innovative start-ups.

This is a quantitative study based on a sample of more than 4,600 Italian innovative start-ups. In order to ascertain whether female-led firms that invest more in innovation grow more than their male-led counterparts, sales growth is analysed through a fixed-effects regression over the period 2015–2019. Propensity score matching is also used to check for potential selection bias.

Results reveal that innovation is crucial for start-up growth and, most importantly, that female entrepreneurs exploit the potential of innovative activities for their firm’s growth better than their male peers.

The results provide important evidence on the link between gender and innovation and how these two elements interact for the growth of firms in their early life. Results also provide insights for policymakers to use in designing programs for promoting female entrepreneurship and participation in science.

The purpose of this study is to extend theoretical understanding on social enterprises’ growth orientation. Inspiration is drawn from the fundamentals of prospect theory and threat-rigidity theory, as the role of external threats as a source of growth orientation is largely absent from the social enterprise growth literature. According to previous studies, social enterprises grow mainly because of their social mission and social opportunities.

The qualitative research is conducted by analysing thematic interviews from seven, growth-oriented social enterprises operating in Finland.

The study provides novel insights on social enterprises’ growth orientation by drawing attention to the plurality of growth motivations and showing the importance of perceived threats as the origin of their growth pursuits. Goals of growth are defined mainly in terms of organisational and financial performance of the firm.

Social enterprise managers and boards are encouraged to cooperate in analysing the significance of external threats and opportunities for their business and to concentrate on defining measurable social goals to ensure balanced growth.

The study demonstrates that the behavioural theories offer a beneficial departure point for studying social venture growth. By clarifying the role of the perceptions of the firm’s internal actors and showing that growth is sometimes seen as a response to external threats, the study increases theoretical understanding on social enterprises’ growth orientation.

High-growth firms generate a large share of new jobs and are thus the key drivers of innovation and industry dynamics. As the employees' education supports innovation and productivity, this article hypothesizes that employee competences explain high growth.

The study approaches this by examining intangible capital and specialized knowledge to evaluate how these characteristics support the probability of becoming a high-growth firm. The estimation uses linked employer–employee data from Danish registers from 2005 to 2013.

As the authors measure high growth with the size-neutral Birch index, they can examine the determinants of high growth across different firm size classes. The findings imply that intangible capital relates positively to the firm's high growth.

Previous research on high-growth firms is concentrated on the owners’ education. This article broadens to the high education of all employees and accounts for the employees’ occupation and capitalization of knowledge with intangible capital.

Investors label high (low) book-to-market (B/M) firms as value (growth) companies. The conventional wisdom supports that growth stocks grow faster than the value ones, creating greater shareholder value. The Purpose of this paper is to analyze how stocks of growth and value companies create value for their shareholders in Brazil, compared to the USA market. For this, the authors analyze three dimensions of return.

First, the authors perform portfolios to analyze the growth rates of shareholders’ return. Then, the authors perform regressions to study the explanatory power of the B/M in growth. The data come from Thomson Reuters Eikon database and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. The authors select all non-financial firms with available data from 1997 to 2017.

The profitability of growth firms is higher than the value ones, in almost every year after the portfolios’ formation, with little variation. Contrary to the findings for the US market, growth companies in Brazil show higher dividend growth than value companies.

It is possible that the database does not contain complete and entirely reliable accounting data, which may partially affect the results.

The findings contradict those exposed in the USA. The implications are the inverse of the US study: the duration-based explanation could be a vital factor for the value premium in the Brazilian stock market. Also, the findings support the standard valuation techniques and help the growth rates estimation in the valuation process (top-down approach).

This study is the first to compare the profitability and dividend growth of growth/value stocks in the Brazilian market. Overall, growth stocks have considerable profitability, and dividend growth compared to value stocks.

This study investigates a mediational model between legitimated elements, financial resource mobilisation and subsequent early firm growth among New Technology-Based Firms (NTBFs) using conformity and control perspectives of legitimacy.

To test the hypotheses, a longitudinal database of 303 NTBFs from Sweden, Finland and France is used. The ordinary least square regression analysis method is applied, and the proposed mediation relationships are studied by employing the four-step approach developed by Baron and Kenny (1986).

This study finds that based on the conformity principle, two out of three legitimated elements (business plan and incubator relationship, but not start-up experience) have an impact on financial resource mobilisation, which in turn, is associated with early growth in NTBFs based on the control principle. Thus, financial resource mobilisation positively mediates the relationships among the two legitimated elements and early growth in NTBFs.

This study has several limitations, which also generate promising pathways for future research. Future research should study the relationship between the three legitimacy elements and financial resource mobilisation and early growth across a wider range of firms and settings. The questionnaire was also based on a single point in time and could not capture the evolving nature of the legitimacy elements and fundraising. Hence, future research can examine the multidimensionality of these processes; longitudinal qualitative studies can be a complement, allowing for a better understanding of the impact of legitimacy on NTBFs.

The findings offer implications for managers of NTBFs because developing legitimacy is critical to NTBFs early growth and development. The findings indicate that NTBFs' founders must systematically develop business plans and that incubators help enhance legitimacy through a signalling.

It is believed that the study meaningfully contributes to the collective understanding of the role of legitimacy in driving the development of NTBFs. Given the importance of NTBFs in our economies, coupled with the lack of attention given to the role of mobilisation of external resources in explaining NTBF early growth, it is believed that the study is both timely and important.

The findings meaningfully contribute to the collective understanding of NTBF growth. While there are studies that have examined the antecedents of growth and finance separately, this study proposes a novel mediational model that integrates both and tests it empirically.

This study aims to enrich the current theoretical debate on the growth of start-up firms by extensively investigating the ongoing empirical studies in this research stream. Moreover, this study identifies drivers whose support roles are confirmed in the literature and recommends further research opportunities.

In this study, we analysed the results of 316 empirical studies on start-up firms and growth and also identified and categorised 66 growth drivers. We presented these drivers in three-dimensional charts: 1) the frequency of using each driver in the 316 studies, 2) the consistency of each driver as measured by the number of studies supporting its statistical significance and 3) the net effect (positive or negative) of each driver on growth.

Our analysis compares extant studies on growth drivers and shows some under-explored growth factors of start-up firms.

Both start-up managers and policymakers can benefit from this study. This study provided managers with a fine-grained tool on the main growth drivers and can guide policymakers in supporting policies for start-up firms.

This study provides a rich, fine-grained and coherent picture of several potential growth drivers of start-up firms. Moreover, we extended our analysis to various potential drivers more than previous studies on this topic, thereby providing fruitful insights into the critical growth factors for start-up firms.

This paper aims to conduct an extensive review and advances a framework for the literature of high-growth firms (HGFs) and scale-ups.

This paper takes the form of a literature review.

The author makes three specific contributions. First, he presents a broad review of high growth in firms, shedding light on the different levels of analysis. Second, he advances a characterization of scale-up companies to enable a better basis for discussion. Finally, he identifies gaps in the existing literature and suggest paths for future research.

The interest in HGFs and those referred to as scale-ups has increased considerably in recent years. Despite this trend, existing studies still have conceptual divergences and a gap separating theoretical inputs from the actual experiences of entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the correlation between firm size, growth and profitability along with other firm-specific variables (like leverage, competition and asset tangibility), macroeconomic variable (like GDP growth-business cycle) and stock market development variable (like MCR).

Using the COMPUSTAT Global database this work uses panel dynamic fixed effects model for nearly 12,001 unique non-financial listed and active firms from 1995 to 2016 for 12 industrial and emerging Asia–Pacific economies. This interrelationship was also examined for small, medium and large size companies classified based on three alternate measures such as total assets, net sales and MCR of firms.

The persistence of profits coefficient was found to be positive and modest. There is evidence of a negative size-profitability and positive growth-profitability relationship suggesting that initially profitability increases with the growth of the firm but eventually, overtime, gains in profit rates reduce, as size increases indicting that large size breeds inefficiency. The relationship between firm's leverage ratio and its asset tangibility is found to be negative with profitability. The business cycle and stock market development variables suggest a positive relationship with the profitability of firms. However, the significance of estimated coefficients was mixed and varied among different selected Asia–Pacific economies.

The study has economic implications on issues such as industrial concentration, risk and optimum size of firms for practicing managers of modern enterprise in emerging markets.

The analysis of the relationship between the firm size, growth and profitability is uniquely determined under a dynamic panel fixed effects framework using firm-specific variables along with macroeconomic and financial development determinants of profitability. This relationship is estimated for a large and new data set of 12 industrial and emerging Asia–Pacific economies.

本研究擬探討公司的規模、成長和盈利能力之間的關係， 同時亦涵蓋公司特有的其它變量 （如愩杆作用， 競爭和資產的有形性）， 宏觀經濟變量 （如國內生產總值增長與景氣之循環）， 以及股市發展變量 (如MCR) 。

本研究以COMPUSTAT 全球資料庫、使用動態面板固定效應模型，涵蓋幾近12001間獨特的、非金融上市及活躍的公司、覆蓋期由1995年至2016年，涉及12個工業及新興的亞太經濟體。這相互關係分析研究亦於大、中及小型企業內進行，而這些企業就規模方面的分類是基於三個交替的測量而釐定的，如總資產、銷售淨額、以及企業的MCR。

研究發現、利潤係數的持續性是正且適中不強的。有證據顯示、規模的大小與盈利能力是負相關的，而增長與盈利能力則為正相關；這暗示盈利能力初時會因企業的成長而增強，但隨著時間的推移最终當規模增大、利潤率的增長會下降，這提示我們：大的規模會導致效率低下。企業的杠桿比率與其資產有形性的關聯被發現與盈利能力成負相關。經濟週期及股市發展變量暗示與企業的盈利能力之關聯為正相關。唯估計係數的意義會因被挑選之各個不同亞太經濟體而有異和不統一的。

本研究對在新興市場的現代企業內工作的業務經理有其實際作用，因研究為他們在業務問題如產業集中度、危機、公司的最佳規模等問題上提供了經濟方面的啟示。

本研究分析公司規模、成長與其盈利能力的關係時，獨特之處是採用了動態面板固定效應模型，並於應用盈利能力的宏觀經濟和金融發展的決定因素的同時，也使用了企業特有的變量。而這關係的分析研究涵蓋12個工業及新興的亞太經濟體的龐大且新的數據集。