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The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide insight as to why some privately held small-to-medium sized firms (SMEs) have been able to outperform their peers in terms of their performance defined as revenue growth, profit growth, growth in number of employees and markets. Little is known about privately held firms and what drives their performance. The second purpose is to synthesize and provide clarity to the extant literature on rapid-growth SMEs (gazelles). The third purpose is to bring a unifying theoretical lens to the literature.

The research was conducted using elite interviews with 47 informants drawn from 21 rapid-growth, private companies. Qualitative methods were used to identify themes related to the strategies used by these firms to outperform their peers over a five-year period.

The study organizes and summarizes the extant literature on rapid-growth companies, provides support for some findings, and clarifies equivocal findings. It also suggests that early strategic choices made by the owners of private firms along with their attitudes and capabilities positioned the private firms for rapid growth. The Morgan and Hunt (1994) trust–commitment theory of relationship marketing emerged from the data as the model used most often by rapid-growth private firms and the one that best integrates the factors driving private firm performance. A modified, two-stage model appears to be warranted. The first stage focuses on respect for the value employees bring, and building their trust and commitment is an essential first step that subsequently drives the second stage of the model – building customer trust and commitment. While some of the outcomes are similar to those suggested by Morgan and Hunt, new outcomes (collaborative innovation, citizenship behaviors, sustained growth, and premium prices) also emerged as important outcomes in this study.

This study provides owners of private firms with insight on how to build and grow their firms in a rapid and sustainable fashion.

Little research has been undertaken on private firms. This study addresses this knowledge gap. The modified trust–commitment relationship marketing model that emerged from the data had not been utilized to date in the field of rapid-growth firms and it provides an integrating theory that explains the performance of rapid-growth private firms.

This study aims to compare rapid‐growth companies with slow‐growth ones in order to provide fresh insights into the attributes of Chinese rapid‐growth companies through an integrated research framework, which was adapted from the framework proposed by Wiklund and by Barringer.

To obtain data for analysis, the research selected the top 30 rapid‐growth firms and the bottom 30 slow‐growth firms from a data bank which contains complete financial data of 533 firms from 2001 to 2003. All data concerning rapid‐growth were coded either one or zero, and were analyzed by Fisher's Exact Test to find out the frequency of important growth variables.

It is found that the major differences between rapid‐growth and slow‐growth firms lie in different favorite firm resources and capacities, task environment, and entrepreneurial strategies. They can create greater value for success with certain entrepreneurs, and might spur those entrepreneurs to push their firms onto a rapid growth road. In addition, the variable of creating unique value emerges as a strong predictor of rapid growth. Entrepreneur orientation strategy is not found to be significantly facilitating rapid growth. This illustrates that all growth companies value highly entrepreneurship‐oriented strategy.

These research findings confirm that growth is not a random event and that entrepreneurs are not necessarily natural. These research findings will promote entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurship in China.

There are two originalities in this research. First, the authors developed a new integrated framework based on previous research achievements. Second, it is the first empirical study concerning company growth variables in China.

The purpose of this concluding paper is to distill several guiding principles, as to how communities can manage rapid tourism growth, drawn from the collection of articles in this theme issue. The paper provides a concise, grounded case study to anchor the overall conclusion of the theme issue.

It summarizes the essence of the different articles comprising the issue, identifies their common link to the strategic question and highlights the relevance of each.

The paper presents six guiding principles for managing rapid tourism growth, ranging from bolstering social support for residents’ livelihood and providing sustainable assistance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to prioritizing community needs for transportation and mobility. Analytic tools to help mitigate the loss of place, identity and heritage and identify optimum levels of visitor numbers are also described.

The paper underscores problems emanating from rapid tourism growth and seeks to synthesize the disparate ideas on precipitous tourism-induced change by anchoring them largely (but not only) in the specific context of Macao as a highly urbanized city affected by rapid tourism growth.

Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.

The main objective of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of high growth and rapid internationalization characteristics in terms of: empirically characterizing growth deriving the profile of high‐growth enterprises, exploring influential factors in high‐growth, pointing out the factors that stimulate internationalization, presenting the combined influence of these factors in both the high‐growth and early internationalizing enterprises, and formulating research‐based policy recommendation for longer and higher growth rates and for decreasing the chances of demise in such younger firms.

The authors have built a longitudinal sample of more than 1,140 micro, small and medium‐sized enterprises that have grown at exceptionally high rates for at least five years at the earlier stages of their life‐cycle, and even from inception in some cases. The data‐base's origin is a popular Canadian business publication, the Canadian Business Magazine, which annually identifies and ranks growing firms in order to publish an annual list called “Profit 100: Canada's 200 fastest‐growing companies”.

The findings of this analysis point to a rich population of high‐growth enterprises with diverse ages, locations, sizes and revenues that manage to achieve high domestic and international growth for much longer and in ways not explained by the extant literature across time and industries.

This research carries the limitations of secondary data. In spite of its richness in terms of the high growth rates, annual lists offer a limited number of attributes per firm. It would be highly recommendable to use case studies in future research and broadly based surveys are necessary for deeper understanding of both the high and rapid growth and internationalization as well as the influential factors, including the internal characteristics of its agents, especially the management.

This research indicates that rapid growing enterprises (RGEs) and rapid internationalizing enterprises (RIEs) are distinctive firms and are primarily small and medium‐sized enterprises. Although the relative frequency of the appearance of various firm size‐categories varies over time, RGEs are found across all the size and age categories. Although their total number as a proportion of all continuing firms in the economy is small, they are among the highly prominent and contributing corporate citizens.

This topic deserves the attention of scholars for the remarkable potential it offers to uncover the puzzle of growth, which is a time‐dependent phenomenon. HGEs attain higher growths in shorter times; thus requiring a relatively shorter tracing of the growing firms. The topic also deserves the special attention of policy makers as HGEs generate employment, income, social benefits, taxes and wealth at much higher and faster rates than an average growing firm.

The attractive features of HGEs' and RIEs' high‐growth phenomenon compelled the authors to explore the topic in more depth than initially intended. By examining rapidly‐growing smaller and younger enterprises, this study covers a wide gap in the extant literature of growth pertaining to the internationalization of smaller firms and thereby contributes the interaction of the two fields.

This multiple case study research aims to identify the characteristics of scaling up SMEs in Chile for exploring how and why some entrepreneurship in the information technology (IT) sector are able to scale up and develop sustainable strategies, based on three consecutive years. The average sales of the companies during the last period analysed was around US$1,323,579, with an average annual growth rate of 66.7%. Scaling up SMEs may require several attributes to achieve positive revenue and develop effective high growth rates that allow them to succeed over several years.

To discern the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, the methodology of multiple case study research was conducted in three parts. The first was to define and design the research process, in which the study should settle the theory analysis and then show that research propositions and questions. The second part of the research was to prepare, collect and analyse the data through crafting instruments and data collection protocols as a source of evidence to conduct the pilot and multiple case study. In this stage, interviews were scheduled, transcribed, analysed and coded to explore how individual attributes may create a scaling-up entrepreneurial process for maintaining or developing high performance in the IT sector. The last part of the research concludes and validates the research propositions for the identification for potential attributes, which were obtained during the qualitative study.

Attributes were selected when 13 or more SMEs reported the importance of this initiative for the process of scaling up their SMEs. As a result of the data analysis, the empirical findings suggest on the importance of the academic background, budgetary control, negative entrepreneurial experiences, building teams, geographical expansion and first critical experience as key attributes for scaling-up. Additionally, the data propose that constructive entrepreneurial ecosystem and reforms financing markets and programmes are two additional components that could moderate the interaction between the scaling-up process and the achievement of rapid sales results as a key outcome measure.

The first limitation was the lack of consensus on the phenomenon of the scaling up of entrepreneurship. Information in Latin America and emerging countries is scarce, which also represents an opportunity for other researchers to deepen and validate the results reported here. Even though it was an attempt to understand the issue of environmental change, this additional limitation did not allow the evaluation of these adjustments over time that can positively or negatively drive the strategies corresponding to the evolution in each of the moderator variables.

Because of the characteristics of the sample in terms of size of the SMEs, industrial sector, location, culture, socio-economic environment and years of establishment of the company, the study cannot be generalised in terms of other industrial sectors or countries. The results of this research are also limited to SMEs in Chile, and to the extent that it can be applied to emerging countries IT sectors with similar sample characteristics, it must be done so with caution. Yin states that eight cases “are sufficient replications to convince the reader of a general phenomenon”.

Policymakers have the option to identify what skills and knowledge the entrepreneur requires to be trained to scale up their established ventures. In this context, they will also benefit from the empirical contribution of knowing what the restrictions that limit this process are, such as adverse tax systems and public strategies. Additionally, it is of public interest because no national records exist on the presence of theoretical terms.

Even though the literature promotes the present findings, it shows that there is an absence of empirical evidence in emerging economies to better comprehend which factors may affect the development process of scaling up entrepreneurship in the IT sector. Both deliberate and emergent strategic initiatives are necessary for the scaling-up process where six critical factors are the basis of the scaling-up. This empirical contribution for entrepreneurs will support the achievement of rapid and sustained sales results for scaling up their ventures.

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between sales growth and profitability by exploring the direct and indirect effects of cost stickiness in the growth process. Cost stickiness refers to asymmetric variations of costs associated with increases and decreases in sales. Cost stickiness is analyzed as a strategic liability that negatively affects profitability because it contributes to organizational rigidity that causes opportunity costs.

The empirical design is based on a large sample of 65,599 French firms drawn from the Amadeus database and it covers the period 2010 to 2019. The authors take advantage of the presentation of expenses made by nature in Amadeus to calculate cost stickiness in a more direct way than what is commonly done in the literature. The authors use various regression models to test the hypotheses.

For firms that experience rapid growth in sales, cost stickiness has a positive moderating effect on the relation between sales growth and profitability because of a higher asset turnover efficiency. However, for firms that experience slow growth, no growth or a decrease in sales, cost stickiness plays a negative moderating effect on the relation between sales and profitability.

This work contributes to the discussion about the conditions under which high growth is associated with greater profitability and conceptualizes cost stickiness as a strategic liability. The empirical context, privately held firms, has been overlooked by previous research.

Research on high-growth firms (HGFs) or gazelles is expanding due to their significant contribution to job growth and economic development. However, the knowledge about the conditions and factors that set these firms on their rapid growth trajectory remains fragmented. Therefore, this chapter provides an abreast inventory of the surging gazelle studies by systematically reviewing the international gazelle growth literature and consolidating firm-level, industry-level, and macroeconomic-level growth factors and their interactions as elaborated in the studies. Based on the review of 62 international empirical studies, this chapter finds that the gazelle growth is complex and multidimensional in its scope and nature. The firm’s growth intention and entrepreneurial nature emerge as necessary but not sufficient conditions to guarantee rapid growth as it results from the impact of and interaction between various firm-level and external factors. The different growth-influencing factors are summarized using a theoretical gazelle growth model, which supports the rare and temporal nature of the gazelle growth.

The purpose of this introductory paper is to provide a broad overview of the significance of this theme issue.

The introductory paper draws from macro data of tourism growth in various countries and highlights the rapid rate of tourism growth in many, especially developing countries. The paper ventures the possibility of an anti-tourism wave in many destinations as a result.

To prevent tourism from displacing and disrupting the lives of residents in many countries, as well as from diminishing the experience for many visitors, the rate with which tourism grows must be studied and managed.

The value of this paper is that it highlights the rate of tourism growth and not tourism growth per se as the critical factor in making tourism a positive or negative force for change in many communities.

Economists have recently emphasized the role which institutional change plays in the process of economic growth and development. Focusing on the behavior of the state, effective constraints on the ruling elite are seen as a necessary precursor to successful economic growth. However, it is argued in this paper that causality runs the other way. Rapid growth (even with dictatorial regimes) leads to political development and institutional structures which provide a foundation for successful long‐term growth. It will be further argued that the greatest potential for stimulating political development comes as the result of rapid agricultural growth. The institutional constraints arising out of political development create an environment within which the ruling elite become developmental rather than predatory. The cases of English and Japanese industrialization will be used to illustrate these ideas. The relevance of the analyses for today's developing countries is discussed and illustrated with reference to the African experience.