The roles of R&D in new firm growth

Abstract

New firms, Innovation, R&D, Firm growth, Alliances, Product development, D21, L23, L25, L26, M13,

Are high-growth firms overrepresented in high-tech industries?

“…Hölzl (2009), moreover, finds that in countries closer to the technological frontier, HGFs have a higher R&D intensity than non-HGFs. Further, in a least squares regression framework, Stam and Wennberg (2009) demonstrate that R&D has a positive effect on growth for the top 10 percent of fastest growing startups, but this is not the case for the overall population of firms. In a study of Spanish firms, Segarra and Teruel (2014) find that R&D investments positively affect the probability of becoming a HGF but the effect is greater and more often significant in manufacturing industries than in service industries.…”

“…Furthermore, because their industry distribution is only one of many aspects of the HGFs under examination, little space is generally devoted to this issue; however, in recent years, some studies (Almus, 2002;de Wit and Timmermans 2008;Hölzl 2009;Wyrwich 2010;Stam and Wennberg 2009;Segarra and Teruel 2014) employ econometric methods to examine it directly.…”

Innovation Strategies and Firm Growth

“…The early papers did document a positive effect, especially for R&D (Mansfield, 1962;Mowery, 1983), and many subsequent papers corroborates that innovating firms grow faster, highlighting the sometimes transitory nature of success in the market (Geroski and Machin, 1992), the role of size and age ( with smaller and younger innovators achieving a more rapid growth, see e.g. Storey, 1994), and the differentiated results across low vs. high tech sectors (Stam and Wennberg, 2009). By contrast, however, a large number of studies do not find any significant effect of R&D or patenting activity on sales growth (see, among the many, Geroski While this lack of a robust relation echoes the more general issue about the unpredictability of growth (Geroski, 2002), the complexity and the uncertain nature of the firms' innovative process as well as criticisms to the adopted proxies of innovation, have been advanced as specific explanations, in turn motivating efforts to measure innovation more accurately.…”

Computer literacy and use of ICT as key factors of micro-enterprise success

“…Steam and Wennberg [24] conducted an empirical study on the effects of research and development (R&D) on new product development, interfirm alliances and employment growth during the early life course of firms. The effect of initial R&D on high-tech firm growth is through increasing levels of interfirm alliances in the first post-entry years.…”