4. Measuring Growth

There is an old adage that what gets measured is what gets done. This may clearly be at work when we look at measuring growth. One of the great banes for most authors trying to do research in entrepreneurship is levels and unit of analysis. When studying the growth of firms there are different levels of sampling and analysis to be considered: individual, firm, industry, and spatial (Davidsson, Researching entrepreneurship, 2005). All these levels, being extremely heterogeneous, require their own types of factors to be considered when attempting to explore factor impact. One major reason to be concerned essential is to consider these as a matter of theoretical representativeness (Davidsson, Researching entrepreneurship, p. 69, 2005). That is, does the sample represent the type of phenomenon that is described by a given theory, be it the resource-based theory of the firm or any other.