CALL FOR PAPERS

ENTREPRENEURIAL GROWTH:

INDIVIDUAL, FIRM, & REGION

Volume 17 of Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth

Due Date: September 30, 2014

Editors: Andrew C. Corbett, Babson College; Jerome A. Katz, Saint Louis University;

and Alexander McKelvie, Syracuse University

After decades of research, growth still remains one of the most important yet elusive concepts within the entrepreneurship research canon.  The extant literature on entrepreneurial growth is robust, but issues remain across all levels of analysis: from the decisions of the individual entrepreneur, to the factors of emerging firm growth, to the macro level of how communities and localities can spur regional economic growth through entrepreneurship.  How do firms grow and what factors drive firm growth?  Why do some firms achieve high-growth while others remain lifestyle businesses?  To grow or not to grow? What are the decisions, firm factors, and other environmental and contextual factors that affect growth?     How do decision and collaborations made by policy-makers and other stakeholders affect regional growth?  These are just a few of the questions germane to growth before entrepreneurship scholars today.

The literature on entrepreneurial growth is vast but as noted by many scholars the concerns about a lack of conceptual understanding or development are just as great (Gilbert, McDougall, & Audretsch 2006; McKelvie & Wiklund 2010; Wiklund, Patzelt, & Shepherd 2009).  Despite great interest from a variety of stakeholders – researchers, government officials, entrepreneurs, and other service providers who support new venture development – we still have not advanced our understanding of growth very far (Leitch, Hill, Neergaard 2010).  Conceptual development has not progressed (Wiklund, et al. 2009), empirical models tend to have relatively limited explanatory power (Coad et al. 2014) and definitive cumulative findings are lacking. These limitations may be due to an overemphasis on growth outcomes as opposed to understanding the growth process itself.   From the very beginning of the process of how entrepreneurs think and make decisions about growth (Grégoire, et al. 2011, Wright & Stigliani, 2013; Corbett 2014) through all phases of growth, scholars need to better understand how firms grow as opposed to just measuring how much they grow (McKelvie & Wiklund 2010). 

Many questions regarding growth remain unanswered. What decisions and designs of the entrepreneur lead to growth?  What are the beginning stages of growth? Are there differences in what drives high growth entrepreneurship versus slower growth entrepreneurship? Are new firms adopting novel approaches to growth? How do growth rates and patterns change over the life of the firm? What policies, infrastructure, and capabilities are necessary to for entrepreneurial regional growth at the macro level?  What are the foundational components necessary for growth across all levels of entrepreneurship? The latest volume of Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth will examine these issues and many other unaddressed issues related to entrepreneurial growth.

Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth provides an annual examination of the major current research, theoretical, and methodological efforts in the field of entrepreneurship, and its related disciplines, including firm emergence and growth research. The Advances series also publishes papers from other fields, such as strategy, organizational behavior, or sociology that use entrepreneurial samples or make a contribution to entrepreneurial theory or research.

Volume 17 will consider the central issue of entrepreneurial growth: the factors, constructs, concepts, and relationships that underpin how and why firms emerge and grow.  Both theoretical and empirical manuscripts that consider all aspects of growth will be considered.  A representative, but by no means exhaustive, listing of relevant topics includes:

Ø  Psychology and individual decision making and growth

Ø  Teams, networks, and sociological factors of growth

Ø  Environmental and economic factors of growth

Ø  Patterns and rates of growth over time

Ø  Modes of growth

Ø  How different growth measures relate to each over

Ø  Alternate empirical measures of firm growth

Ø  Theoretical and conceptual models of entrepreneurial growth

Ø  Necessary infrastructure to stimulate regional growth

Ø  Regional and industry clustering and their impacts on growth

Ø  Turnaround and revitalization efforts for firms and regions.

Ø  Synergies between growth in firms and regions.

Ø  Decline, closures and events that challenge or derail growth.

The papers in Advances reflect many state-of-the-art topics and approaches, and are written by leading researches in the field, making each volume an important source of information for virtually all entrepreneurship researchers. One of the distinctive competences of research volumes such as Advances is that the chapters can be published without page restrictions allowing for greater detail in the background, development, and implementation of ideas than is possible in journal articles. This provides authors with the opportunity to fully express their key ideas, provide much more complete support, and include relevant multi-page appendices. In effect, the Advances series provides authors the opportunity to publish an "article of record" of their major theoretical or empirical ideas, and see it disseminated to a wide audience. Today, the series is in the libraries of virtually all of the schools with active Ph.D. programs in entrepreneurship, as well as the majority of AACSB accredited schools with MBA concentrations in entrepreneurship and related fields.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss paper ideas with interested researchers.  Contact information for the editors:  Andrew Corbett, acorbett@babson.edu; and Jerome Katz, katzja@slu.edu; and Alexander McKelvie,  mckelvie@syr.edu.