Internationalisation of high-tech start-ups and fast growth-evidence for UK and Germany

Oliver Bürgel, Andreas Fier, Georg Licht and Gordon Murray

No 00-35, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: For firms acting in technological niches the expansion into foreign markets can be a way to increase sales and to thus to recover initial sunk costs over a shorter time frame. Our research, based on survey data for nearly 600 British and German high-tech start-ups, examines whether internationalisation leads to faster growth among high-tech start-ups. Results show that firms with international sales have higher sales growth than firms that sell only domestically. We find that technological sophistication of products and the experience of entrepreneurs has a positive impact on growth. In addition, intense competition and shorter windows of opportunity increase the pressure to grow rapidly to appropriate the returns from innovation. The findings suggest that high tech firm founders should be more determinedly international in their vision and strategies from the very start of their business to increase the economic success of their efforts.

Keywords: start-ups; high-technology industries; internationalisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 L21 L60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24381/1/dp0035.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:5318

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().