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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.

Despite the mounting evidence of gazelles’ higher economic contribution, there is no consensus on whether and how to support gazelles. In this chapter, we therefore discuss varied gazelle policy views as well as the inherent challenges of supporting gazelles. Here, we draw on relevant academic literature as well as on international policy examples. Additionally, we analyze Germany’s gazelle policy stance by triangulating information collected from the literature, practical policy examples and interviews, we carried out with German support agencies and policymakers. Though Germany’s general policies and framework conditions create necessary conditions for gazelles to emerge, they are insufficient to guarantee their prevalence. Moreover, Germany’s policy approach of encouraging new firm formation and self-employment and its focus on the financial support for small as well as technology or innovation-oriented firms is not consistent with the state-of-the-art knowledge about gazelles. Using the case of Germany, we argue that general entrepreneurship policies and high-growth entrepreneurship (gazelle) policies are distinct approaches having divergent and sometimes conflicting objectives and support mechanisms, which need to be synchronized to be effective.

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.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the relation between the value/growth anomaly and the external financing anomaly by considering an expanded value/growth indicator: free cash flow yield (free cash flows scaled by price).

The paper utilizes portfolio‐level tests and cross‐sectional regressions.

In line with the literature on contrarian portfolios, this paper finds that firms with low (high) free cash flow yield are experiencing low (high) returns. However, only when an investor buys (sells) stocks of firms with high (low) free cash flow yield that distribute (raise) capital, his zero‐cost portfolio is significant. These findings are robust, irrespective of the financing vehicle (equity or debt). Overall, their evidence suggests that distinctions between the value/growth anomaly and the external financing anomaly partially disappear, if one is willing to employ free cash flow yield as a proxy of the former anomaly.

The paper enhances one's understanding of the relation between asset pricing anomalies.

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.

This paper aims to examine factors influencing the high growth of new firms in metal‐based manufacturing and business service firms in Finland. It seeks to compare the factors of how new firms achieve a high rate of growth during the first four years and years five to eight.

The study reported here is part of a longitudinal research project that has followed the development of 200 SMEs in Finnish metal‐based manufacturing and business services since their start‐up in 1990. At the seven‐year follow‐up the present study concentrates on the 86 surviving firms. Logistic regression analysis was used as statistical technique in locating differences between high‐growth and other firms and their owner‐managers in the selected attributes. This paper focuses on Storey's key elements. In search of potential differences in these characteristics between high‐growth firms and other firms, this study compares Finnish firms in relation to founders' motives in starting up on their own account and in their individual background characteristics, changes in strategic factors, changes in networks and management styles during various stages of entrepreneurship.

The results indicated firstly that there is a clear connection between entrepreneur's know‐how and the high growth of firms. Secondly, the findings of this study demonstrate that external networks as a management capability bring about great competitive advantage, innovations and efficiency, especially during the first four years. However, the findings of five to eight years of development contradict the findings of the first four years. The results show that the use of internal networks has a positive effect on firms' high growth during years five to eight years. Finally, the results show that industry sector affected high growth, especially in specialised metal industry firms, both during the first four years and after five to eight years of development.

The implications of this study for academics, educational institutions, entrepreneurs, and other practitioners are that the so‐called support services of internationalisation and growth for new firms are most important. These support services could be developed with public sector assistance in areas such as financing research, innovation and information technology projects.

The paper provides a framework for testing the factors that differentiate growing new ventures during various stages of entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to analyze the effect of industry growth rates on the characteristics of high-growth firms (HGFs) that are active in a particular industry. By making a distinction between HGFs active in stable and declining industries and HGFs active in growing and high-growing industries, it is analyzed if the main dimensions of firm performance are significantly different for HGFs active in one of these different industry types. Gaining more insight into this industry aspect of high firm growth is important as governmental measures towards HGFs may be more effective if they have a specific sectoral focus.

A subset of 740 Belgian HGFs was analyzed. Data were gathered from the Belfirst database. HGFs were classified within their corresponding industry type: a declining industry (negative growth), a stable industry (0 −5% growth), a growing industry (5 −10% growth) and a high-growth industry (>10% growth). Four dimensions of structural firm performance that are expected to correlate with high growth were taken into consideration: productivity (value added per FTE), profitability (ROA), innovativeness (intangible assets) and financial health (solvency and liquidity).Tukey's range tests in conjunction with post-hoc analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were carried out to test for significant differences in all the mentioned variables for the HGFs in the four different industry types.

Results show that HGFs active in a stable industry are not significantly more profitable or innovative than HGFs active in a growth industry. However, significant differences could be encountered when it comes to the other two dimensions of structural firm performance: productivity and financial health. It is shown that HGFs active in declining and stable industries are significantly more productive than HGFs active in growth industries and high-growth industries. Also, HGFs active in declining and stable industries have significantly higher liquidity ratios than firms active in growth industries, pointing towards a better financial health for HGFs in nongrowing industries.

The results confirm the conceptual logic that the differences between resource-based view (RBV) and industrial organization (IO) propositions will have an impact on the drivers of firm performance and high business growth. Every future study that focuses on the growth determinants of HGFs should be aware that considering the subset of HGFs as one homogenous group may be suboptimal. It is likely that the growth determinants of both HGF types will indeed be fundamentally different.

Until now, all studies on HGFs have considered the subset of HGFs as a whole. This paper tried to disentangle the subset based on the growth rate of the industry in which HGFs are mainly active. In this proposition, a reason for the lack of knowledge about characteristics of HGFs may – at least partially – be found in the fact that industry membership plays an important role in determining the characteristics of a high-growth firm. Future studies focusing on high-growth determinants may benefit from systematically taking the industry growth rates into account, with the knowledge that the propositions of two different theories – IO and RBV – may be the fundamental drivers of a firm's high-growth rates.

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.”