Understanding the sources of business growth is central to both the fields of entrepreneurship and strategy. This is a logical endeavor given the positive macro-level outcomes of firm growth, such as the creation of new jobs, an increase in tax revenues, the provision of innovations, and overall...

Stevenson (1983) holds that entrepreneurial management, defined as a set of opportunity-based man-agement practices, can help firms remain vital and contribute to firm and societal level value creation. While his conceptualization has received much attention, little progress has been made...

H. H. Stevenson suggests that firms’ management practices range along a spectrum from highly entrepreneurial to highly administrative. At the entrepreneurial end are promoter firms with a focus on new opportunities and at the administrative end are trustee firms with an inward focus on...

'Introduction' In their path-breaking article, Low & MacMillan (1988) suggest that entrepreneurship be defined as the 'creation of new enterprise'. The purpose of entrepreneurship research should be to 'explain and facilitate the role of new enterprise in furthering economic progress' (p. 141)....

When the first author reviewed the literature on small firm growth in the mid 1980’s for his disserta-tion work, he noted that surprisingly few studies had focused on that specific problem (Davidsson 1989a; 1989b). Today, this is no longer true. In recent years ever more comprehensive lists of...

Business growth has become a major theme in the rapidly expanding field of entrepreneurship research. Entrepreneurship researchers are not alone, however, in showing an interest in business growth. Therefore, there is reason to ask whether and under what conditions the study of growth really...

Edith Penrose’s theory of firm growth postulates that a firm’s current growth rate will be influenced by the adjustment costs of, and changes to a firm’s productive opportunity set arising from, previous growth. Although she explicitly considered the impact of previous organic growth on...

In the words of Hubbard, Vetter and Little (1998, p. 252), 'systematic replication replaces piecemeal, untested results with useful findings that address practical problems.' We agree with this. We further hold that for empirical relationships to be really interesting and meaningful one should...

In this article we investigate how small business managers? beliefs concerning the con-sequences of growth influence their overall growth attitude. We find this to be an important question. Although previous research has shown that small firm growth is the most important source of new jobs...