Young Innovative Companies: the new high-growth firms?

Young Innovative Companies (YIC) gained increasing attention from governments and 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 (< 6 years), small (< 250 employees), and R&D intensive (R&D intensity > 15%). 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 perform significantly worse than the other firms.