Towards a differentiation of high-growth trajectories (continuous HG vs. discontinuous HG)
Researchers and politicians are prone to focus on the issue of firms with continuous fast growth, the “gazelles”, defined as companies which show four successive years of high growth (according to the definition proposed by Birch, 1979). The public authorities, by their support to these researches and these firms’ trajectories, certainly see a rapid way to meet their own objectives (in terms of national industrial strategies, exports, employment, etc.). However, this focus on the continuous high growth may contribute to (1) shaping an erroneous view of the development of SMEs, seen as “an organizational form which must necessarily grow rapidly to become an intermediate-sized enterprise” and, (2) nurturing simplistic arguments such as “firms that enjoy continuous high growth perform better than others”? In fact, few studies on the topic of the high growth firms deal with the issue of the continuous growth versus the discontinuous growth. As a consequence, this paper aims to answer to different questions: Is a continuous process better than a discontinuous one? What are the strengths of a discontinuous high growth process? Do the firms that manage a discontinuous fast growth process exhibit the same features and capabilities as the “gazelles”? In order to better understand the differences between these two growth processes, this research paper aims to compare a sample of firms with continuous high growth, which correspond to the classical notion of gazelle, to a sample of firms exhibiting a discontinuous rapid growth. We also use a control sample comprised of non-growing firms. Comparisons are made on demographic variables (age and size) and financial variables (access to financial resources and financial performance). This preliminary descriptive analysis shows that the continuous high growth and the discontinuous high growth do not require the same kind of support from the public authorities. The paper ends with directions for further research.