The hyper-growth of family SMEs (Summary)

By understanding hyper-growth firms, researchers may better understand the features involved with firm growth and success in general, and dynamics of new job generation and general economic development. The phenomenon constitutes a theoretical and empirical challenge to classical stage-based growth models and is still largely overlooked by academic research, especially in Europe. Consistently with the Resource-Based View (RBV), recent research papers suggested that high performance can be explained in terms of existence of unallocated resources within the firm. These (non-financial) indivisibles resources - called slack - are available in quantities greater than necessary and are expected here to be one of the main causes and incentives for hyper-growth. It is therefore in particularly interesting to study firms that have idiosyncratic approach to resource; this is the case of family business, which are surprisingly disregarded as far as hyper-growth is concerned. A significant influence of the family on hyper-growth may be expected in light of two main reasons: the managerial parsimony that characterizes the family governance archetype; the non-economic goals that drive the behavior of family firms.