Young Innovative Companies: the new high-growth firms?
研究了欧盟定义的年轻创新企业是否在就业和销售上比其他企业增长更快，基于2001-2008年佛兰德企业数据发现其增长显著更快，尤其在高增长企业中表现突出。
Young Innovative Companies (YIC) gained increasing attention from governmentsand scholars owing to their expected high innovative performance and growth. Consequently, this study investigates whether YICs, as defined by the European Union (EU), grow more than other firms, both in terms of employment and in terms of sales.Using a database of Flemish firms during the years 2001-2008, this study reveals that these firms do grow significantly more than other firms. In addition, this study shows that YICs can be differentiated from New Technology-Based Firms and small,young firms in terms of growth, pointing to the importance of combining the individual properties characterizing YICs, that is being young (56 years), small (5250 employees), and R&D intensive (R&D intensity 415%). In our estimations, we also take the underlying distribution of the growth variables into account by performing quantile regressions. The results of these quantile regressions reveal that YICs especially grow faster than the other, already fast-growing firms, indicating that they are high performers. In addition, we did not find that these companies performsignificantly worse than the other firms. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved.