dissertation in pdf-format - Aalto-yliopisto

7
1 Introduction
for jobs, technological progress and wealth creation (Acs et al., 2008; Birch,
1979; Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen, 2002).
Currently, no set of measures for assessing firms’ performance and
identifying highly successful firms is universally accepted by
entrepreneurship and small business researchers (Murphy et al., 1996;
Parker et al., 2010), despite efforts by the Eurostat and OECD (2007) to
formulate common definitions of some aspects of high organizational
performance (e.g. high growth). Furthermore, very few empirical studies
have focused on factors affecting performance in a small firm context
holistically, and there has been little relevant conceptual and
methodological development, although numerous theoretical and empirical
studies have examined the innovation, growth and success of firms
separately. These studies continue to face many challenges, associated with
(inter alia): operationalization of the concepts; identification and selection
of key variables; and measurement of innovation, growth, success and other
important characteristics of entrepreneurial firms (Birley et al., 1995;
Markman and Gartner, 2002, OECD Oslo Manual, 2005). As Shepherd and
Wiklund (2009) stated, major causes of the limited theoretical development
in contemporary performance (growth) studies are likely to be
methodological issues, including:
A lack of theory-driven models (Davidsson and Wiklund, 2000)
Narrow theoretical focus of most studies (Wiklund et al., 2009)
Multiple definitions of high performance (Parker et al., 2010)
Problems of comparing diverse studies (Delmar, 1997)
Problems in acquiring relevant data (Birley et al., 1995)
Problems in selection of variables (Janssen, 2009)
Problems in transformation of variables (Delmar, 1997)
Problems in selection of appropriate timespans (Davidsson and
Wiklund, 2000)
Studies focusing on growth and success in the small business context
often conceptualize organizational performance multidimensionally (Baum
et al., 2001). Furthermore, Wiklund et al. (2009) pointed out that literature
in the field of entrepreneurship growth is highly fragmented, and that
several theoretical perspectives have been independently developed. In
addition, there have been few attempts to connect or combine these diverse
theoretical frameworks and concepts. A further problem in previous growth
research studies, highlighted by Davidsson et al. (2009), is the lack of
consideration of financial success when analysing the growth of firms.