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...

Longitudinal panel studies of large, random samples of business start-ups captured at the pre-operational stage allow researchers to address core issues for entrepreneurship research, namely, the processes of creation of new business ventures as well as their antecedents and outcomes. Here, we...

Quantitative studies of nascent entrepreneurs such as GEM and PSED are required to generate their samples by screening the adult population, usually by phone in developed economies. Phone survey research has recently been challenged by shifting patterns of ownership and response rates of...

The purpose of this paper was to examine the factors affecting the future firm size expectations of nascent entrepreneurs. This was done by testing a decision model on a unique data set composed of a random sample of nascent entrepreneurs. The proposed model is based on four different components...

This study investigates the role of high growth firms for the creation of new employment in Sweden during the 1987-96 period. Our data set is unique in the sense that it captures both enterprise and company group levels of analysis, and in that organic growth can be separated from growth through...

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...

Strategic entrepreneurship can be described as simultaneous opportunity seeking and advantage seeking. Younger firms are generally more flexible and therefore enjoy 'discovery advantages', whereas established firms tend to be resource rich and more experienced and consequently enjoy...

Firm growth is almost universally portrayed as a good thing, and is commonly used as a measure of success. Applying resource-based reasoning, we argue that growth is often not a sign of sound development. Specifically, we hypothesize that firms which grow without first securing high levels of...

Paul Davidson Reynolds is the 2004 winner of the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. In this article Professor Reynolds? contributions are summarized in terms of four sets of triplets. The first is as innovator, coordinator and disseminator of novel and...

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...