Putting process on track: empirical research on start-ups’ growth drivers

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the growth drivers of start-up firms from the process perspective. Increasing scholarly attention to the growth of start-up firms has led to a more sophisticated understanding of their drivers. However, the richness of the results is partly offset by both potential and real contradictions in the literature.\ud Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, 233 studies on the growth of start-up firms are reviewed using a process-oriented lens.\ud Findings – The analysis reveals an imbalance in the use of variance-based empirical approaches to study the process-based phenomenon and some misalignments in the use of non-process-based empirical approaches to improve a process-based theory.\ud Originality/value – This paper offers an original perspective from which to reconsider the relevant literature and provides useful recommendations for researchers to forge a path ahead in this field. Keywords Literature review, Start-ups, Firm growth, High-growth firms, Process view\ud Paper type Literature revie

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“…2. Start-ups (Pugliese et al, 2016) and MSMEs (Nolan & Garavan, 2016) operate to provide value to customers and generate profits for themselves. 3.…”

“…Start-ups have been studied by many researchers across different countries and in different business and market contexts because of the very high potential economic and social value they hold for those countries and contexts (Hillemane et al, 2019; Ojaghi et al, 2019; Pugliese et al, 2016; Tripathi, Seppanen et al, 2018). Yet, there are no accepted definitions of Start-ups (Bortolini et al, 2018; Spender et al, 2017; Zaech & Baldegger, 2017).…”

Disaster management within the framework of a changing disaster landscape

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“…Second, we consider the response phase not just as an enumeration of potential activities, but as an unfolding global process of stages and sub-processes following a disaster impact. The advantage of a process-based approach is that it supports complex and non-linear explanations about how and why sequences of events occur (Pugliese, Bortoluzzi, & Zupic, 2016), which is typical for disaster response and especially for a context in which more disasters have the potential to evolve into 'disasters out of the box'. The paper begins with a clarification of the changing disaster landscape and an explication of the notion 'disaster out of the box', and is followed by an overview of existing disaster phase research.…”