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Figure 1. Major themes identified during the SLR.
A small firm
Speaking about the growth, the most cited growth article (Ferreira et al., 2015) defined a
firm as a ‘collection of resources bound together in an administrative framework, the
boundaries of which are determined by the ‘area of administrative coordination’ and
‘authoritative communication’’ (Penrose, 1995:xi). Although Penrose’s definition was
appropriate for her paper, it might not suit this study because it highlighted administrative
framework. Anyadike-Danes et al. (2015) showed that majority of job-creating firms were
small. Those firms may require other resources, more than managerial services (Pitelis,
2002). Therefore, according to Westhead and Storey (1996:18), ‘theories relating to SMEs
must … recognise that these differ from those facing larger firms.’ For the purpose of this
study, EU definition was chosen because it differentiated between micro and small firms.
Furthermore, a phenomenon of HGFs was defined by OECD (2007:61): ‘All enterprises with
average annualised growth greater than 20% per annum, over a three year period should be
considered as high-growth enterprises. Growth can be measured by the number of
employees’. This definition was used in multiple studies (M. Anyadike-Danes et al., 2015;
Brown & Mawson, 2015) and at least partly replaced high-growth metric invented by Birch
(1987).
Job creation
This section aimed to identify and analyse phenomenon of employment creation at the
regional level. To achieve this, various sources of the literature were employed. Van Praag
and Versloot (2007) systematically analysed 57 articles between 1995 and March 2007 to
reveal the contribution of entrepreneurs. Studies discussed by them were extended with
papers from the SLR and more industry focused review of De Kok et al. (2013). The analysis
was focused on the regional level. However, helpful national and international studies were
included. Therefore, firstly this section explained how job creation might depend on the
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