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This study aims to analyze the paths and mechanisms of firms’ sustainable high growth. Firms’ high growth is susceptible to interruption, stagnation or reversal. Thus, how firms can achieve sustainable high growth is an important topic that requires urgent discussion and has significant implications for sustainable economic development and employment.

This study applies a longitudinal case study approach to portray the process by which Jiashu orchestrated digital elements with traditional resources to continuously fulfill their user demands and ultimately achieve sustainable high growth.

This study reveals three resource orchestration strategies: trust-oriented, demand-oriented and efficiency-oriented. These strategies are adopted in an organization’s startup, expansion and maturity periods, respectively. By dynamically integrating and orchestrating digital elements with traditional resources, firms implement a growth strategy with expanding and stacking dimensions, leading to sustainable high growth. The replicability and connectivity resulting from orchestrating digital elements and traditional resources encourage firms to expand their dimensions of growth and achieve sustainable high growth in multiple dimensions.

This study conducts a preliminary exploration of the relationship between the integration of digital and traditional elements and the sustainable high growth of enterprises. A more stable theoretical relationship between the two requires further multi-case studies and empirical analysis for substantiation.

This study first clarifies the concept of sustainable high growth and reveals a unique nonlinear path characterized by growth with expanding and stacking dimensions. The findings contribute to deepening the theories of sustainable high growth and resource orchestration in the digital economy era and offer practical implications for the sustainable high-growth practices of firms.

High-growth firms (HGFs) make a considerable contribution to economic growth, and in recent years they have received increasing interest from entrepreneurship scholars. By analysing recent findings in the literature of high-growth firms, this study identifies some Stylized Facts, as well as contradictory findings, and also some unknowns regarding the determinants and internal strategies of HGFs, particularly on the persistence of their superior growth performance and the implications of recent findings for economic policy.

I test empirically the hypothesis that the monitoring role of the board of directors depends on the severity of the agency problems and the amount of information needed to monitor. I show that in high growth firms, where the agency conflicts are low and managers are likely to reveal more information to get advice, boards are more independent but less likely to monitor, while in low growth firms, boards are less likely to be independent, but the relationship between firm value and board independence is strong. Overall, boards become more independent but monitor less as firms’ growth opportunities increase, suggesting that managers trade off the amount of information released to the board to get a better advice and to mitigate the monitoring role of the board.

This study examines the relationship between board composition and firm value, and the extent to which this relationship may be affected by a company’s investment opportunity set. There is little research that examines this issue, particularly for the New Zealand market. Of the research that exists, and generally for the research that examines how board composition affects firm performance, the findings have been mixed. Using a randomly chosen sample, which improves the external validity of results from prior studies, we find that board composition of high growth option firms is positively related to firm value, and this relationship is maintained when more refined measures that proxy the characteristics of outside directors (such as tenure of outside directors, the level of outside director equity ownership, the number of other board positions held by outside directors, and the total proportion of non‐executive directors, including grey directors) are recognised.

Rapid growth constitutes both a theoretical and an economic issue. Thanks to a comparative study of five high growth small and medium sized enterprises located in Rhône-Alp and Provence (France), the authors propose a processual analysis of high growth trajectories. The purpose of this paper is to identify trajectories and tools implicated in the construction and maintenance of a high growth trajectory.

The contribution is a comparative, qualitative study of five medium size companies in France that have experienced growth of more than 20 percent annually for at least four years. This study is based on 25 semi-directive interviews with company managers.

First, high growth is a result of the psychological state of the company leader. Second, high growth is a manifestation of a secure enterprise geographically based where the company originated. This, however, implies discomfort once high growth occurs when physical expansion obliges moving to unfamiliar locations. Finally, in companies with high growth trajectories, support functions develop relatively late.

The results corroborate certain previously presented findings and bring forth new conclusions particularly concerning the place of the leader, the existence of thresholds and the relative homogeneity of trajectories.

Based on an empirical investigation of the development of a group of manufacturing SMEs comparing the characteristics and strategies of firms achieving high growth between 1979‐90 with the weaker performing companies. Shows that high growth can be achieved by firms with a variety of size, sector and age characteristics; such firms are distinguished more by the strategies and actions of managers than by their profile characteristics. The clearest differences between fast growth firms and other firms are with respect to their approach to product and market development. While high growth firms were above average investors they were not production‐led; instead they were characterized by an ability to make changes in production to complement an active market development strategy. To grow successfully over ten years, firms also needed to develop their internal organizational structure in ways that enabled the leader of the firm to delegate responsibility for operational tasks to become more focused on strategic level functions. Job generation was particularly concentrated in the high growth firms which also demonstrated an ability to increase labour productivity at the same time as they were increasing employment.

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.

The main objective of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of high growth and rapid internationalization characteristics in terms of: empirically characterizing growth deriving the profile of high‐growth enterprises, exploring influential factors in high‐growth, pointing out the factors that stimulate internationalization, presenting the combined influence of these factors in both the high‐growth and early internationalizing enterprises, and formulating research‐based policy recommendation for longer and higher growth rates and for decreasing the chances of demise in such younger firms.

The authors have built a longitudinal sample of more than 1,140 micro, small and medium‐sized enterprises that have grown at exceptionally high rates for at least five years at the earlier stages of their life‐cycle, and even from inception in some cases. The data‐base's origin is a popular Canadian business publication, the Canadian Business Magazine, which annually identifies and ranks growing firms in order to publish an annual list called “Profit 100: Canada's 200 fastest‐growing companies”.

The findings of this analysis point to a rich population of high‐growth enterprises with diverse ages, locations, sizes and revenues that manage to achieve high domestic and international growth for much longer and in ways not explained by the extant literature across time and industries.

This research carries the limitations of secondary data. In spite of its richness in terms of the high growth rates, annual lists offer a limited number of attributes per firm. It would be highly recommendable to use case studies in future research and broadly based surveys are necessary for deeper understanding of both the high and rapid growth and internationalization as well as the influential factors, including the internal characteristics of its agents, especially the management.

This research indicates that rapid growing enterprises (RGEs) and rapid internationalizing enterprises (RIEs) are distinctive firms and are primarily small and medium‐sized enterprises. Although the relative frequency of the appearance of various firm size‐categories varies over time, RGEs are found across all the size and age categories. Although their total number as a proportion of all continuing firms in the economy is small, they are among the highly prominent and contributing corporate citizens.

This topic deserves the attention of scholars for the remarkable potential it offers to uncover the puzzle of growth, which is a time‐dependent phenomenon. HGEs attain higher growths in shorter times; thus requiring a relatively shorter tracing of the growing firms. The topic also deserves the special attention of policy makers as HGEs generate employment, income, social benefits, taxes and wealth at much higher and faster rates than an average growing firm.

The attractive features of HGEs' and RIEs' high‐growth phenomenon compelled the authors to explore the topic in more depth than initially intended. By examining rapidly‐growing smaller and younger enterprises, this study covers a wide gap in the extant literature of growth pertaining to the internationalization of smaller firms and thereby contributes the interaction of the two fields.

Few high-growth firms (HGFs) are able to maintain high-growth over time. The purpose of this paper is to find out why only a small number of firms become persistent HGFs, explicitly focusing on the role of the founding entrepreneur in this process.

Initially, 28 semi-structured interviews were performed with high-growth entrepreneurs to discover why so few founders could become persistent high-growth entrepreneurs. In a second phase, four case studies were conducted to uncover the factors that facilitate a swift evolution from the “managerial” role to the “strategic” role.

High-growth entrepreneurs, who quickly make a transition from a managerial role into a strategic role are more likely to keep their firm on its high-growth trajectory. This transition is made possible by: the early development of strategic skills; the presence of a high quality human capital base; and an organizational structure with characteristics from Mintzberg’s “machine bureaucracy.”

The results are vital for entrepreneurs of “one-shot” HGFs with the ambition to make their firm a “persistent” HGF. If high-growth rates are to be sustained, the three factors that emerged from the authors’ analysis should foster the delegation of managerial tasks, resulting in an easier transition toward a “strategic role.”

Insights are valuable as both founders and governmental institutions can benefit from knowing which factors contribute to a successful phase transition from “manager” to “strategist.”

Gazelle companies are characterized by rapid growth in a short time. Identifying the determinants of this exponential expansion is important as these firms have a significant impact on the economy. They generate increased employment and investment by investors interested in new opportunities. Previous studies have failed to reach a consensus about what fosters high growth in gazelle companies as each firm’s geographical, political and economic context is different. The present research uses cognitive mapping and interpretive structural modeling (ISM) to overcome the limitations of prior investigations and identify factors that can potentially accelerate growth in gazelle companies.

Two sessions were held with an expert panel with knowledge about and experience with these firms. In the first session, data were collected to create a group cognitive map, while the second meeting comprised ISM-based analyses of the high-growth determinants identified and the causal relationships between them. A final consolidation session was held to discuss the results with two members of the Committee for Central Region Coordination and Development (i.e. Comissão de Coordenação e Desenvolvimento Regional do Centro – a public entity that grants gazelle awards in Portugal).

The analysis system created was tested, and the results demonstrate that the dual methodology used can increase our understanding of the dynamics of high-growth determinants and lead to more informed and potentially better evaluations of gazelle companies. Indeed, once high-growth determinants in gazelle companies are understood, this information can help other firms implement the same business model to achieve similarly rapid growth. The strengths and shortcomings of this new structured analysis model are also analyzed.

The authors know of no prior work reporting the integrated use of cognitive mapping and ISM in this study context.