Errata

Amendments have been made to Figures 17 and 19 as well as the text on pages 27 and 28. As of October 2010.

Foreword

Thriving businesses are vital to the UK's economic recovery. Businesspeople, investors and policymakers agree that they create jobs, wealth and wider prosperity.

If government is to create the right conditions for businesses to grow, it must understand how this growth happens and what lies behind it.

This report provides a comprehensive look at UK business growth over the past decade. It makes a powerful case that a small number of high-growth businesses are responsible for the lion's share of job creation and prosperity. It is the counterpart to Business Growth and Innovation, which considers the wider benefits of growth businesses, their socio-economic impact, and the relationship between growth and innovation.

This has significant implications for the direction of economic policy. It suggests that focusing attention on growing businesses and promoting excellence, far from an elitist policy, gives rise to widespread job creation and prosperity.

We believe that this report will be a powerful contribution to the debate on how to foster economic growth. As ever, I welcome your views.

Stian Westlake Executive Director of Policy and Research, NESTA

October, 2009

NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Our aim is to transform the UK's capacity for innovation. We invest in early-stage companies, inform innovation policy and encourage a culture that helps innovation to flourish.

Executive summary

High-growth firms are of central importance to economic policy. These 'exceptional firms' have the potential to drive UK economic performance through their extreme rates of growth. They are argued to be the engine of creative destruction, replacing unproductive firms and thus enhancing long-term productivity growth. And they are expected to play a major role in increasing employment as the economy emerges from the current downturn.

But despite the importance of business growth for job creation and productivity growth, we do not really know much about how businesses grow in the UK. The recent availability of a newly developed business demography database by the Office of National Statistics opens up the opportunity to address this gap.

This report provides the first comprehensive study of business growth rates in the UK. We focus particularly on identifying the number of high-growth firms, describing their distribution across sectors and regions. And we give special consideration to their direct contribution to the growth of employment. We also use the data to examine the survival and growth profile of a cohort of start-ups over ten years.

High-growth firms also have an indirect impact on local economic performance. So to complete the picture a separate NESTA report, Business Growth and Innovation, ¹ examines the wider impact of growing companies in 45 UK city-regions, studying also the links between businesses' growth and their innovation activities.

Our methodology and data

We analyse detailed business registry information for all UK businesses between the years 1998 and 2008, extracted from the Office for National Statistics' Business Structure Database. Specifically, we look at the distribution of growth rates in employment and sales for these businesses over two three-year periods, 2002-2005 and 2005-2008, breaking it down by sector, location and company age. Last but not least, we also examine the evolution over a decade of all the start-ups founded in the UK in 1998.

We follow the OECD methodology and define a high-growth firm as any firm with a minimum of ten employees at the beginning of a three-year period that achieves an average annualised employment growth greater than 20 per cent over that period.

High-growth companies are rare, but generate a majority of jobs

High-growth companies represent only 6 per cent of all UK firms employing ten or more people, but accounted for more than half the growth in jobs. More specifically, 11,530 high-growth firms were responsible for 1.3 million out of the increase in 2.4 million new jobs in established businesses employing ten or more people between 2005 and 2008 (54 per cent). ² Most companies only experience modest growth, and the number of businesses that decrease in size is similar to the number that increase their size. The analysis for the 2002-2005 period leads to similar conclusions.

UK high-growth firms, on average, tripled their employment over a three-year period. In 2005-08 the average high-growth firm started with around 60 employees in 2005 but had over 170 employees in 2008.

Consequently, it is the minority of firms experiencing high-growth who are responsible for half of the increase in employment in existing businesses. Therefore, interventions

that target firms with higher growth potential are likely to be more efficient than general business support policy for all SMEs, many of whom lack the ambition to grow.

It's not just about start-ups

Young firms are more likely to be high-growth, but the majority of high-growth firms (70 per cent) are at least five years old. Still, young high-growth firms are responsible for a fifth of the increase in employment in all high-growth firms.

A detailed examination of the evolution over a decade of the almost quarter of a million start-ups founded in 1998 sheds more light. Most new businesses start small and stay small. While roughly a third survived to 2008, only 10 per cent of the survivors had ten or more employees ten years later. And fewer than 5 per cent had more than 20 employees in 2008.

What is more, very few start-ups (7,239 firms out of the full 1998 cohort) experience an instance of high-growth in their first ten years of life. ³ And even fewer of them (2,776 firms) manage to achieve multiple instances of high-growth. For instance, fewer than a 100 firms record more than five instances of such high-growth over a ten-year period.

The implication of this is that merely encouraging start-ups is unlikely to lead to dramatic growth if they fail to expand. Policymakers should focus on quality and not just quantity.

High-growth firms are found across the UK

High-growth firms can be found in every part of the UK. Like the general business population they are particularly abundant in the South East and London. However, the regional pattern varies between our two periods: Wales had the highest share of high-growth firms in 2002-05 but Scotland was at the top of the table in 2005-08. For the manufacturing sector the evidence is more clear-cut. The regions with the highest shares of high-growth manufacturing firms in both periods were the North East, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

The UK had a large number of high-growth firms compared to other countries

The UK had one of the largest shares of high-growth firms among OECD countries in the period 2002 to 2005, the latest year for which internationally comparable data is available.

A more detailed examination by sector shows the UK ahead of the United States in terms of the proportion of growth firms in a variety of sectors, in particular financial intermediation, but not in manufacturing. High-growth firms in the US were also older. Only 9 per cent of US high-growth firms were younger than five years old, which compares to at least a third in the UK. Therefore, more established businesses in the UK are significantly less likely to be growing in terms of employment than their counterparts in the US.

All sectors have high-growth firms

High-growth firms are not concentrated in 'high-tech' or 'growth sectors': all major UK sectors contained between 4 and 10 per cent of high-growth firms. Almost half the high-growth firms in the UK are in business services or the wholesale and retail sector.

However, the balance between different sectors does appear to reflect trends in the economy in the period: the sectors with the highest proportion of high-growth firms were financial services (over 9 per cent) and real estate and business services (around 8 per cent), while the lowest share was found in manufacturing (around 4 per cent).

Part 1: Overview

1.1 Purpose

High-growth firms have attracted considerable attention from the policy community. They are considered to be 'exceptional firms' which are responsible for driving economic growth through extreme rates of growth (employment, sales, profits) and engagement in innovative behaviour.

But the evidence for the UK on high-growth firms is very limited. ⁴ This report aims to help fill this gap. We construct the first comprehensive study on high-growth firms in the UK using a new longitudinal business demography database covering the population of businesses.

We quantify the number of high-growth firms in the UK, present their characteristics and compute the number of jobs that they create. And a new NESTA report published in parallel complements this analysis by examining the contribution of high-growth firms to innovation activities and wider economic and social outcomes. ⁵

This report is one of the first to exploit a new source of data constructed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the Business Structure Database (BSD). This database provides business demography information for the full population of businesses in the UK for the period 1997 to 2008.

The core research questions driving our analysis can be summarised as follows:

1. How many high-growth firms are there in the UK economy?
2. What are the characteristics of high-growth firms? What is their initial size, in what sectors are they to be found, are they young or longer established firms – and how many jobs do they create compared to other groups of firms growing more slowly?
3. What does the growth pattern of a cohort of business start-ups look like over time? Do faster growing firms display continuous year-on-year growth or do we observe single episodes of high-growth?
4. What is the relationship between high-growth and business survival? Do businesses with single or consecutive periods of high-growth survive better than businesses which grow more slowly or do not grow at all?

1.2 Defining high-growth firms

A variety of terms have been used by policymakers and academics to refer to these 'exceptional firms'. We talk, sometimes interchangeably, about 'high-growth firms', 'high impact firms' or gazelles and 'super-gazelles' before discussing the relative merits of 'high-tech start-ups' and 'born global start-ups'. The fact that many of their characteristics overlap adds to a general lack of clarity about policy options.

A recent review of 19 studies noted that there is no general agreement on the definition of high-growth firms and gazelles. ⁶ Definitions vary in terms of the following: choice of growth

indicator (e.g. employment, sales or profits); measurement of growth; length of time-period over which growth is measured; and whether growth through acquisition is included or is it just organic growth? ⁷

However, a consensus has emerged around the definition of 'high-growth' adopted by the OECD, which we follow in this report:

A high-growth firm is defined as a firm with an average employment growth rate exceeding 20 per cent per annum over a three-year period and with ten or more employees at the start of the period. ⁸

1.3 What do we know about high-growth firms?

Over 20 years ago, research noted that a small number of fast-growing firms created most new jobs. For example, in the United States in the period 1981-85 just 18 per cent of firms were responsible for 86 per cent of the new jobs. ⁹ Looking in more detail at these companies they were found to be volatile: "dynamic firms pulsate sharply as they grow" (p.51), growing sharply in one period, falling back in another period, and then growing again. And later the OECD suggested that these 'exceptional firms' include both large and small firms and young and old firms. ¹⁰ A number of key findings emerge from the literature from a variety of countries:

1. A few rapidly growing firms generate a large share of all net new jobs, irrespective of the population studied. This is particularly marked in recessionary periods when these firms continue to grow.
2. High-growth firms, and especially those aged less than five years (i.e. gazelles), can be of all sizes and although small firms are over-represented some larger gazelles are observed to sustain high-growth levels.
3. Newness is a more important factor than small size in terms of rapid growth. Young firms are more likely to be high-growth than old firms, even if a majority of high-growth are old.
4. High-growth firms are found in all industries. They are not over-represented in high-technology industries. If anything, they are over-represented in services.

1.4 The UK Business Demography Database

What is conspicuous in both the job creation and gazelles literature is the very limited contribution of UK studies. Data availability and quality have been the main obstacle to comprehensive research in this area. However, with the construction of the new Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR)-based Business Demography dataset (i.e. the Business Structure Database - BSD) for the 1997-2008 period, it is finally possible to examine firm growth in the UK with the degree of rigour that has been present in other international studies.

The analysis of firm-level growth rates and high-growth over time presented in this report is based solely on the BSD which has been accessed through the UK ONS Virtual Micro-Data Lab (VML). The detailed discussion of the nature and scope of the BSD can be obtained from the ONS and it is not the intention to go into the detailed method of its construction. ¹¹

In order to utilise the OECD definition of high-growth firms and facilitate international comparisons we focus on the three-year periods 2002-2005 and 2005-08 for the distribution of growth rates and the characteristics of high-growth firms. In addition, we use the 1998 cohort of start-ups for the analysis of growth trajectories, survival and a close look at job growth across the size bands for survivors.

Throughout the report we use the term 'employer enterprise' ¹² both to define a start-up for the cohort analysis and for the analysis of growth rates for the population of businesses in the 2002-05 and 2005-08 periods. Our key variables are: number of employees; turnover; business age; sector and region. Overall, the merged BSD dataset for the years 1997-2008 contains approximately 4.5 million records. Within this there is a subset of 1.08 million businesses which we use to undertake the growth rate analysis for 2002-05 and 1.7 million businesses in the analysis for 2005-08. The number of private sector businesses included in the analysis of the 1998 cohort start-ups is 221,731.

1.5 Structure of the report

The structure of the report is as follows:

• Part 2 presents the analysis of growth rates across the population of UK businesses for the two three-year periods 2002-05 and 2005-08. From this analysis we quantify the number of high-growth firms in the UK. We present information on their initial size, age and sector and regional distribution. We look at their contribution to job creation and examine the available international comparative evidence.
• Part 3 examines the 1998 cohort and analyses the pattern of employment growth over the ten years to 2008. As well as identifying the pattern of growth for all firms, we seek to categorise for high-growth firms whether their growth is episodic or continuous. Allied to this we present a detailed transition matrix which shows the employment growth of different size start-ups in the 1998 cohort. We also compare the survival rates for high-growth firms with those for slower-growth firms.
• Part 4 discusses the implications for policymakers that arise from this report and identifies potential questions for future research.

Part 2: Firm growth rates in the UK

2.1 Introduction

The task in this chapter is relatively straightforward – to establish how many high-growth firms there are in the UK economy. However, as a first step we want to put this question in context – that is, within an analysis of the distribution of growth rates in the population of businesses over specific time periods. In other words we take the definition of a high-growth firm (i.e. at least 20 per cent average annual growth in employment or turnover over three years) and present it as one of a number of growth intervals across the population of businesses in the UK.

We focus on two three-year periods: 2002-05 and 2005-08. While the UK business demography dataset can be used for any time period between 1997 and 2008 we chose these periods for two main reasons. First, to be consistent with the OECD definition of high-growth firms we use growth rates over three years. Second, to aid international comparisons, we derive a UK figure for the proportion of high-growth firms for 2005 which is the latest year that data is published on selected OECD countries. Of course, we also present data on the 2005-08 period to ensure we have the most up to-date information for the UK.

2.2 Profile of UK survivors

In the two periods 2002-05 and 2005-08 we have identified 1.1 million and 1.7 million surviving firms respectively that satisfied the following condition and for which we present the growth rate analysis:

A business which had non-zero employment for each of the years in the analysis and which were not 'born' (i.e. employed their first employee using the definition of a '1' employer enterprise) in the first year of each period. ¹³

Overall, such survivor firms employed 16.2 million and 19.2 million people in 2002 and 2005 respectively.

Before presenting the growth rate analysis it is useful to review some of the characteristics of the population of businesses in both these sub-periods. We can do this in terms of initial employment size, business age and sector. Figure 1 shows that, as expected, the vast majority of firms that survived the two periods were micro-enterprises (they had fewer than ten employees): 83.5 and 88.3 per cent respectively. However, as Figure 2 shows, half of UK employment in the UK is found within firms employing at least 250 people. By contrast, micro-enterprises provide less than one out of every five jobs, a significantly lower proportion than in other OECD countries (for example, 1.5 million surviving micro-enterprises employed 3.6 million people in 2005).

Comparing the two periods, we can observe an increase in the share of micro-enterprises within the total stock of survivors in the latter 2005-08 period. This actually masks the true scale of the difference and it is only when we examine the actual numbers that we begin to understand the dynamic. For example, in absolute terms there were an additional 600,000 micro-enterprises in 2005 than there were in 2002 that went on to survive for three years. Overall, micro-enterprises employed 3.6 million people in 2005 compared to 2.5 million three years earlier. However, the average size of

these micro-enterprises had fallen from 2.8 to 2.4 employees between the two periods.

What conclusions can we draw from these headlines? They suggest that the increase in the stock of firms in the UK economy is being driven by firms employing two or three people. This may be an indication of the success of policies designed to see more new ventures created but which do not necessarily focus on growth. We return to this issue in more detail in the next section of this report when we look at the growth trajectory, or size transitions, of a cohort of start-ups in the UK.

Turning to business age, Figure 3 shows that in both periods well over half the firms in the UK were at least five years old at the start of the period. ¹⁴ The remaining two-fifths of firms were spread evenly across the other four single age categories (i.e. years 1 to 4).

Figure 4 clearly shows that in the UK it is businesses at least five years old that provide the most jobs. In both 2002 and 2005 around eight in ten jobs were in such older businesses. So, we can conclude that older firms are not only numerically more important, they also provide the vast majority of jobs in the UK economy – 16 million in total.

The sectoral activity of UK firms for both 2002 and 2005 is presented in Figure 5. Financial and Business Services represent around one-third of businesses while one-fifth of firms are involved in Wholesale and Retail activities. Manufacturing, Construction and Hotels and Restaurants each represent around 10 per cent.

Figure 6 presents the employment distribution across three broad private industrial sectors. In both 2002 and 2005, around one in four jobs were involved in the production sector ¹⁵ (a fifth of firms) while the service sector (excluding business and financial services) provided two-fifths of all jobs.

2.3 Distribution of firm growth rates

2.3.1 All employer enterprises

The performance of UK firms can be analysed simply by examining their growth rates over time. We examine two three-year periods 2002-05 and 2005-08 and allocate firms into one of 11 growth intervals. ¹⁶ Figure 7 presents the distribution of the three-year firm growth rates in terms of employees and turnover for both periods. ¹⁷ Appendix 1 contains tables which present the actual number of firms and

employment in each of these growth interval categories disaggregated by size, age, sector and region.

We can see that employment did not increase in the vast majority of businesses in the UK in either period. The bulk of the distribution – 60-65 per cent – is concentrated in the middle 'no growth' category (i.e. growth between -1 per cent and +1 per cent). Outside this middle category the distribution is almost evenly balanced: 21 per cent below and 17 per cent above. It is also relatively symmetric. Finally, half the 'non-middle' weight is shared by the extremes in the distribution: minimum (2-20 per cent) around 10 per cent; maximum (≥+ 20 per cent) - again around 10 per cent.

Figure 7 also presents the distribution of growth rates across the 11 growth intervals in terms of turnover for the two periods. The contrast with the employee-based distribution is stark. ¹⁸ The shape of the distribution appears more normal - apart from the two extremes. Yet, as with employees, the extremes of the distribution contain significant numbers of firms (250,000 in 2002-05 and 330,000 in 2005-08). ¹⁹

Furthermore, the distribution is different between the two time-periods. In the earlier 2002-05 period just over 14 per cent of firms exhibited 'no growth' in turnover whereas almost two-thirds added no employees. However, in the more recent 2005-08 period the proportion of firms registering a small decline in turnover (i.e. -1 per cent to -5 per cent) rises to just over two-fifths (40.8 per cent). In the 2002-05 period a broadly similar proportion of firms (14 per cent) are in the extreme fast growth category in terms of turnover as we observed with employees (10 per cent). However, in the most recent period this has fallen to 9.8 per cent (9.5 per cent for employees).

Overall, therefore, in 2005-08 we observe a significant rise in the number of firms experiencing 'no growth' in employees as well as an even greater rise in the number of firms recording a small decline in terms of turnover (i.e. -1 per cent to -5 per cent). There was also a fall in the number of firms experiencing any growth on both measures - this is particularly noticeable for turnover.

2.3.2 Enterprises with ten or more employees

The interpretation of growth rates for very small firms needs to be done carefully, since it can be misleading. In short, if a firm with a single employee hires an additional employee, it is doubling its size, resulting in a 100 per cent growth rate. Moreover, given that micro-firms (1-9 employees) constitute the majority of firms in the UK their influence in overall firm growth distribution may be overstated. Because of this, we also examine the firm growth distribution with firms with ten or more employees, as seen in Figure 8. ²⁰

The distribution of growth rates for firms with ten employees or more differs from that of all firms in the following ways (compare Figures 7 and 8). First, with respect to employment growth, there are fewer firms with ten employees or more which are in the high-growth category and also significantly fewer in the 'no growth' category. This confirms the notion that the majority of micro-enterprises (1-9 employees) do not grow and the minority that do experience high rates of increase upon a small base. Second, when we compare the distribution of growth rates in terms of turnover between all firms and those with ten or more employees the profile is almost the same. The only real difference is that there are significantly more micro-enterprises recording 'no growth' in the 2005-08 period than larger firms.

We also note that the number of firms employing ten or more people that registered a 1 per cent to 5 per cent decline on the turnover measure increased dramatically in the 2005-08 period - in line with that observed for all firms and is a clear indication of the early effects of the economic downturn in the UK and global economies (see Figure 7).

2.4 High-growth firms

2.4.1 There were 11,500 high-growth firms in the UK

Table 1 presents the headline statistics for the number of high-growth firms in the UK. Overall, we can report that, using the employee definition, there were 11,369 high-growth firms in the 2002-05 period and 11,530 in the 2005-08 period. This represents a very small proportion of all firms (0.94 and 0.61 per cent respectively) but a larger proportion – 6.4 and 5.8 per cent respectively – of firms employing ten or more employees in the base year.

Using the turnover definition doubles the number of high-growth firms in the UK: 22,439 and 18,641 respectively in the two three-year sub-periods. This represents 13 and 9 per cent respectively of the population of all firms with ten or more employees at the start of the period.

We can see that by defining growth in terms of turnover the proportion of fast-growth firms increased slightly in 2002-05 but was similar for the later 2005-08 period. The number of high-growth firms increased markedly in both periods although the number was lower in 2005-08 when the proportion had fallen from 12.8 to 9.4 per cent of the total number of businesses with ten or more employees.

Table 1: Fast-growth and high-growth firms: definitions by employment and turnover

Source: ONS Business Structure Database. Notes: * Fast-growth is defined as having at least 20 per cent annual average growth in employment/turnover over three years, regardless of the initial size of the firm. ** High-growth is defined as for Fast-growth but with at least ten employees in the initial year. *** Defined as an employer enterprise with non-zero employment in each year.

2.4.2 High-growth firms make a large contribution to employment

How important are high-growth firms to the national economy? We compare their job creation record with other firms with more modest growth (i.e. less than 20 per cent annual average growth in employment). We focus on the number of high-growth firms derived from the employment-based measure.

The 11,369 high-growth firms identified in the 2002-05 period employed 2.67 million people in 2005 an increase of 1.9 million jobs on their total employment in 2002 of 773,551 employees. Overall, therefore, their share of employment more than tripled from 3.5 per cent of total private sector employment in 2002 to 11.6 per cent in 2005, just three years later. ²¹ How does this compare with the number of jobs created by firms experiencing more modest growth in the period? These 45,204 'average' firms (also employing ten or more employees in the base year) ²² increased their employment from 4.7 million in 2002 to 5.8 million in 2005 an increase of 1.1 million jobs. Therefore, the 11,369 high-growth firms had experienced an increase of almost three and half times more jobs by 2005 (Figure 9).

By contrast, the 11,530 high-growth firms in 2005-08 employed significantly fewer people: they went from 714,731 employees in 2005 to 1.98 million in 2008, which was still an increase of 1.3 million jobs in a three-year period. Their share of total private sector employment was 3.12 per cent in 2005, almost tripling to 8.4 per cent three years later. But the number of net jobs created in high-growth firms had declined by about 600,000 in comparison to the 2002-05 period.

The job creation comparison between the 11,530 high-growth firms and the 49,505 'average' growth firms in 2005-08 is therefore less marked in absolute terms – 1.3 compared to 1.1 million jobs respectively. However, in relative terms Figure 9 clearly shows that high-growth firms in this period had still managed to record an increase of around three times as many jobs as they employed in 2005.

Put another way, we know that between 2002 and 2005 existing UK businesses with ten or more employees who recorded growth created 2.98 million net jobs. Of these, high-growth firms created 1.9 million jobs or almost two-thirds of the total. This share fell to just over half of net job creations in the 2005-08 period:

that is, 1.3 million jobs out of a total of 2.4 million net job creations.

A similar conclusion emerges if we consider all the jobs created by existing businesses, including those jobs created by microenterprises (businesses with fewer than ten employees). ²³ Established firms (regardless of their size) created 3.4 million net jobs in 2002-05 and 2.9 million net jobs in 2005-08. Consequently, these 11,500 high-growth firms accounted for 56 per cent of jobs created by existing businesses in 2002-05 and 43 per cent in 2005-08, or an average of 49.5 per cent between 2002 and 2008.

Therefore, putting the numbers in perspective, between 5 and 8 per cent of all private sector jobs at any time have been created by the spurt of high-growth of a 'few' firms during the prior three years.

2.5 Where are UK high-growth firms located?

We now examine the regional distribution of high-growth firms in both periods (Figure 10). ²⁴ In absolute terms, around one-third of high-growth firms are to be found in Greater London and the South East. ²⁵

However, it is more important to investigate the share of high-growth firms across the UK regions standardised by the stock of businesses employing ten or more people. We must be careful interpreting these data as we know that the location of the business is determined by where a business with many local units chooses to record its employment. So, for example, a region which records a high proportion of high-growth firms may benefit statistically if fast growth in plants in other regions of the UK is allocated to the headquarters. It is for that reason that we do not, at this stage, go beyond a simple description of the regional distribution.

Nevertheless, the regional data presented in Table 2 show some notable patterns. Perhaps not surprisingly, Greater London had an above-average share of high-growth firms in both periods with the South East above-average in 2005-08. However, in both periods some peripheral regions (Wales and Northern Ireland in 2002-05 and Scotland and the North East in 2005-08) have above-average shares of high-growth firms than other more central and southern English regions.

If we restrict the analysis to manufacturing only to overcome any industry compositional effects of the business stock in different regions the 'North-South' differences are still in evidence (Table 3). This is particularly the case for Wales and Northern Ireland which have a significantly higher proportion of high-growth firms in manufacturing than any other UK region in the 2002-05 period. This share falls in the later period, although it is still above average, and might reflect a lack of sustainability of growth in small regional economies such as Wales and Northern Ireland.

Apart from Greater London, all the other regions with above average shares of high-growth manufacturing firms in both periods are in the more peripheral areas of the UK in this period, although the East Midlands region records a marginally above-average share in the 2005-08 period. This finding merits further investigation but there may well be some connection here to the role of the major state aid in these UK Assisted Areas. ²⁶

2.6 The characteristics of high-growth firms in the UK

The discussion of the characteristics of high-growth firms in this section will concentrate on the employee-based definition which facilitates the widest international comparisons and avoids the problems identified by the OECD which we set out earlier. We present data on the numbers of high-growth firms by initial employment size, business age and sector as well as discuss what sub-groups of high-growth

Table 2: High-growth firms share of all firms (10+ employees) in the UK regions

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Table 3: High-growth firms share of all firms (10+ employees) in the UK regions: manufacturing only

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

firms make the biggest contribution in terms of job creation.

2.6.1 There is little variation in the share of high-growth firms by firm size

The majority (four-fifths) of high-growth firms in the two periods employed fewer than 50 employees in the base year (i.e. 2005 or 2008) with just over half employing between ten and 19 people (Figure 11). However, when we calculate the proportion of high-growth firms in each employment size category we find very little variation (Table 4). For example, in the 2002-05 period, the share ranges between 5.9 per cent for the 20-49 employee size band to 6.8 per cent in the 50-99 employee category. The other three size bands have slightly above-average shares at 6.5 per cent. In the 2005-08 period, again there is very little variation between 5.2 and 5.9 per cent with the 100-249 employee category recording the lowest proportion and the 10-19 employee the highest.

However, while firms employing fewer than 50 employees were numerically important, it is clear from Table 4 that around half of the 2.67 million jobs in the 11,369 high-growth firms in 2005 were in firms that employed 250 or more people in 2002. Although employing fewer people in 2008 the same pattern was observed for the 11,530 high-growth firms identified between 2005 and 2008.

In both time periods firms with more than 250 employees increased their average size threefold from just over 1,000 employees on average to around 3,000 employees three years later. However, Table 4 also shows that high-growth firms employing fewer than 50 employees recorded a higher ratio of employment increase compared to larger firms.

More importantly, in terms of job creation, we observe that a small number (~350-400) of larger high-growth firms employing more than 250 employees were responsible for almost half

Table 4: Employment in high-growth firms by initial employment size

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Table 5: Job creation in high-growth firms by initial employment size

(a) High-growth firms 2002-05

(b) High-growth firms 2005-08

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

the jobs (~45 per cent) created in this group of firms (Table 5).

Nevertheless, small high-growth firms employing fewer than 50 employees are not unimportant. They created just over half a million jobs in 2005 and almost 400,000 in 2008. Significantly, the rate of job increase in small high-growth firms is slightly higher than firms employing more than 100 employees. Overall, therefore, between a quarter and a third of net job creation in high-growth firms took place in those firms employing fewer than 50 employees three years earlier.

2.6.2 Young firms are more likely to be high-growth, even if most high-growth firms are old

The vast majority (70 per cent) of high-growth firms were at least five years old in both sub-periods (Figure 12), which is consistent with the fact that most firms are of that age. There were only 3,446 gazelles in the UK in the 2002-05 period and marginally fewer in 2005-08 (3,230 firms) – around a third of all high-growth firms. However, the share of high-growth firms among young firms (less than five years) is significantly higher than for older firms: 11.2 compared to 5.4 per cent in 2002-05 and 8.5 compared to 5.1 per cent in 2005-08.

Gazelles are, on average, smaller in size with over three-fifths employing fewer than 20 employees in the base year compared with over half of high-growth firms (Figure 13). This translates into an average of 42 and 34 jobs in gazelles in 2002 and 2005 respectively, compared with 68 and 62 jobs in all high-growth firms. In 2005 and 2008 the

average size of gazelles was 139 and 109 jobs respectively and the comparable figures for high-growth firms were 235 and 171.

How important were these gazelles in the overall scale of job increase? We have already established that high-growth firms recorded an increase of 1.9 million jobs in the three years 2002-05 and we can observe that gazelles created only a fifth of those jobs in both periods. Therefore, gazelles were responsible for a very small proportion of net job creation in the UK economy in the period under review: only 9 per cent of jobs in the 2002-05 period and 15.7 per cent in the 2005-08 period.

Figure 14 compares the scale of job increase between gazelles and all high-growth firms across their initial employment size bands. We can see that the main differences are that the majority of the job increase by gazelles is in firms employing fewer than 50 people, whereas for high-growth firms 45 per cent of the net job creation is in firms employing more than 250 people.

So, while we observe a group of firms that may be termed 'super-gazelles' or 'gorillas' in the UK - defined as employing more than 250 employees, they are very few in number (~50 firms) and they were responsible for only 24-30 per cent of the increase in employment in gazelles in 2005 and 2008 respectively. Longer established, larger high-growth firms are, therefore, more important in terms of net job creation than these super-gazelles.

2.6.3 High-growth firms exist in all sectors of the UK economy

Figure 15 clearly illustrates that high-growth firms can be found in all sectors and there is no evidence that they are more likely to be in the 'high-tech', knowledge-based or creative sectors of the economy. For example, around one-fifth of high-growth firms are involved in Wholesale and Retail trades with a further third engaged in Construction, Hotels and Restaurants and Personal Services. One in six high-growth firms were in the Manufacturing sector while just over a quarter were in Financial and Business Services. The pattern is broadly consistent over time.

However, Figure 16 reveals that the proportion of high-growth firms varies quite markedly by sector and that the pattern is broadly similar

in both periods. Manufacturing has the lowest proportion (around 4 per cent) with Financial and Business Services the highest (around 8-9 per cent). This above average share is not that surprising given the performance of these sectors in the UK and what this analysis reveals is that one firm in every ten in these sectors (i.e. those employing ten or more employees) recorded high-growth. The remaining sectors had shares around the average for the UK (i.e. 6 per cent).

2.7 UK in context - international comparisons ²⁷

This is the first study to provide accurate measures for the number of high-growth firms in the UK which can be compared with other countries. To date, data weaknesses have made international comparisons problematic but the ongoing work within the OECD in collaboration with national statistics offices has made important progress. As a result of the availability of the new UK business demography database we can now make some comparisons with OECD business demography statistics for 2005. ²⁸

What we can see immediately from Figure 17 is that the share of high growth firms in the UK is amongst the highest of the OECD countries for which data was available, with the same share as the US – 5.2 per cent. ²⁹ These figures equate to 10,417 high-growth firms in the UK compared to 48,550 in the US.

The fact that the share of high-growth firms in the UK is identical to the US goes against commonly held beliefs that the US is a more fertile ground for 'exceptional' businesses to thrive. It is perhaps more the case that high growth firms within the two countries have different experiences. The UK could well have high-growth firms that either initially or subsequently grow more slowly, while US firms may be more successful at sustaining high-growth over a long period of time, and thus becoming global champions. In fact, as the next section shows, that scenario is a very uncommon finding in the UK.

We can examine some of these hypotheses with existing data, as we do next. But further data is required to shed light on some of these issues. Because of this, NESTA and FORA ³⁰ are currently working together to collect more detailed comparable cross-country data on firm growth, which will help to provide a more granular picture of the differences in firm growth across several countries, including the US and the UK.

Existing data does, however, already highlight some interesting differences. In the US the proportion of high-growth firms that can be categorised as gazelles was 9.2 per cent (i.e. 4,457 firms) which compares to almost a third in the UK (i.e. 3,127 firms). In other words, therefore, high-growth firms in the US are more likely to be older (5+ years) than those in the UK. ³¹ This is a significant difference and becomes important given the lower contribution by gazelles to net job creation in the UK. This would seem to point towards a smaller overall impact of high-growth firms in the UK compared to the US. This is clearly an important line of enquiry for future research.

A comparison of the sectoral distribution of high-growth firms in the UK and the US reveals some differences (Figure 18). First, there are more construction high-growth firms in the US than in the UK. Second, there are more Business Service high-growth firms in the UK than in the US. Finally, there are marginally more manufacturing firms among the stock of high-growth firms in the UK than in the US (17 per cent compared to 13 per cent).

Another important issue in this comparison, which is perhaps masked by the overall identical share, is the extent to which the shares of high-growth firms differ within the same sector between the UK and the US. Figure 19 reveals that there are higher overall proportions of high-growth firms in the US in all sectors except for Wholesale and Retail, Hotels and Restaurants and Financial Intermediation. Of particular note is that Financial Intermediation has the largest share of high-growth firms in the UK whilst in the US it is the Construction sector.

It is not possible accurately to benchmark the other findings from our analysis in the UK with equivalent data for the US. However, a recent study of 'high-impact firms' in the US shows some findings consistent with our own. ³² For example, the average age of a US high-impact firm is 25. Similarly, high-impact firms exist in all industries and are by no means confined to high-technology industries. There is, therefore, some consistency between the US and our own analysis for the UK despite the differing time periods and definitions.

2.8 Summary

The small number of high-growth firms in the UK employed around one in every ten jobs in the private sector. They have been responsible for around half of the net job creation by existing businesses in the six years prior to the current recession. So, although they are few in number they have made significant positive contributions to employment change in recent years. International comparisons reveal that the UK had one of the highest shares of high-growth firms in 2005 among OECD countries for which data is available.

We observe that high-growth firms are found in a diverse range of sectors and are particularly concentrated in Business Services, Wholesale and Retail as well as Production. This is consistent with other studies and is a reminder not to assume that 'high-growth' businesses are solely to be found in high-technology sectors or other industries which have attracted considerable policy attention in recent years such as knowledge-based sectors and the creative industries.

Numerically, high-growth firms tend to be small (fewer than 50 employees) and indeed these smaller firms created between 26-31 per cent of all the net job growth in this group of firms.

The majority are well established (i.e. more than five years of age) in the markets they are operating and, therefore, we conclude that gazelles are not a common feature of the population of high-growth firms in the UK. Further, the sub-set of gazelles is not the major source of net jobs within the UK as the more established high-growth firms are responsible for most of the increase in employment.

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Footnotes

Part 3: Growth and survival: a ten-year cohort perspective

3.1 Introduction

An analysis of growth over three-year periods allows international growth comparisons and is more timely, but it does not provide a full picture of a firm's long-term development. Therefore, we present a detailed examination of the 1998 cohort of new entrants ('births') in the UK. We are interested in how these firms grew year after year from inception – with ten years of data from the UK business demography dataset we can undertake this analysis.

We will explore a number of related questions. First, we are interested in the timing of the 'high-growth events'³³ in a ten-year period. For example, does high-growth occur immediately after start-up or some years later when firms are more established in the market? Second, we investigate the extent to which survival rates for firms recording a 'high-growth' event are higher than those businesses that have not. Third, we present a detailed analysis of job creation by the 1998 cohort of start-ups over ten years.

• 'High-growth': ten or more employees and growth of 20 per cent in that year (note that this is different from the average over a three-year period definition used in the previous sections).³⁵
• Alive but not high-growth (this category includes firms growing more slowly, not growing at all or declining in that year, and those growing by more than 20 per cent but having fewer than ten employees).
• Not Active or no employment which signals its disappearance from the database (the IDBR reference number ceases to be live). This could be for a number of reasons which do not necessarily relate to the death or closure of the firm – for instance, they could have been acquired and be still operating as another legal entity (e.g. subsidiary).

Of the almost quarter of a million firms in the 1998 cohort, just 7,239 recorded one or more annual instances of 'high-growth' in the decade 1999 to 2008. That is, only 3.1 per cent of all start-ups grew by more than 20 per cent in a single year (once they had achieved ten or more employees). Not only was the experience of high-growth relatively rare, but multiple instances were even rarer, affecting only about one-third of high-growth firms (2,776). In other words, only 1.2 per cent of firms in the cohort achieve annual growth higher than 20 per cent (on a base of ten employees) more than once over a ten-year period.

The number of firms recording a single instance of high-growth varied considerably over time, there were many more episodes in 2001 and 2002 than before or after. In other words, firms were more likely to experience an annual spurt of high-growth when they were three or four years old (although it is not possible to distinguish between the effect of age and that of the economic cycle).

3.2 Growth trajectories of the 1998 cohort

3.2.1 Achieving 'high-growth' in consecutive years is rare

We examine the 221,731 firms that were born in 1998 and had at least one employee.³⁴ We compute the annual growth rate in employment for each year in the ten-year period (1998/99 to 2007/08) and then code each year into three categories:

Figure 20 is a sequence index plot³⁶ which is designed to provide some further insight into the timing of these annual high-growth episodes recorded by all the 7,239 firms which experienced such an episode. Each firm's history is represented by a single horizontal 'strip'. Firms are split into those which are not active (white), those with 'high-growth' (purple) and the remaining firms which were still alive (light purple).³⁷

Needless to say, we are most interested in the high-growth firms: a purple rectangle one row 'high' and one year 'wide' is a single episode of high-growth. The firms experiencing only one year of rapid growth stand out very clearly as the relatively large purple rectangles, one for each year with their height proportional to their frequency. Equally clear are the mixed fortunes which follow an instance of high-growth. For example, in a number of cases, most obviously for those whose high-growth instance comes quite early, white patches – denoting that the business is not active subsequently – are clearly visible. Most commonly, though, high-growth (purple) is followed by slower growth, no change or decline (light purple).

So, if we take the 1,185 firms which were born in 1998 and achieved their first episode of substantial growth in 2000-01, the plot shows us that only 42 per cent of them experienced another year of high-growth and were still active by 2008, 36 per cent subsequently never experienced high-growth and 22 per cent became inactive.

We can also see that relatively few firms record multiple instance of high-growth. However, because of the relative rarity, and also because consecutive episodes (even for firms recording multiple instances of high-growth) are even rarer and so difficult to 'see', the frequency of multiple instances is recorded on Table 6. There are only 2,776 firms out of the 221,731 UK start-ups born in 1998 that experience more than one year of high-growth, and almost two-thirds of these are accounted for by the 1,822 firms recording just two instances (i.e. less than half as common as single instances). It is

worth noting that amongst firms experiencing high-growth twice, only one-third record consecutive instances.

Very few firms record more than two instances of high-growth. Just 639 firms recorded three instances. The largest number of instances was eight, recorded by only one firm: so for the 1998 cohort, the chances of experiencing eight years of 'high-growth' were around 1: 221,731.

3.2.2 Firms experiencing high-growth are more likely to survive

We saw earlier in Figure 20 that some high-growth firms do disappear from the BSD (presumed closed), but Table 7 shows the number is small, both absolutely and relatively. Whilst 60 per cent of the overall cohort has 'died' by 2008, the proportion of high-growth firms dying is just 18 per cent. Evidently, the experience of high-growth and survival are very closely and positively related. Moreover, the proportion 'dead' amongst firms recording a 'high-growth' event is inversely related to the number of high-growth instances. For firms with a single instance of high-growth almost one-quarter are dead by 2008, while for multiple instance firms the average proportion is just one-tenth.³⁸

3.3 Job creation and the start-up cohort of 1998

The previous section examined the scale of employment increase in high-growth firms. Here we return to this issue by looking at the profile of employment change in a cohort of start-ups (those firms that started in 1998) since their first year of operation. What we are interested in showing here is the relative contributions of different sized start-ups as they survive and grow over a ten-year period. This is a different, yet complementary, way of investigating which firms make the most important contributions to employment growth in the UK.

The 1998 cohort of start-ups contained 221,731 firms and 1.1 million employees; a decade later the 83,165 survivors had 644,000 employees (Table 8). At birth, the distribution of firms and employees by size-band were quite different: 80 to 90 per cent of firms have fewer than five employees; whilst 70 to 80 per cent of employees are in firms larger than five employees. By 2008, although the strong contrast in concentrations remains, there are fewer very small firms, and employees in this cohort of firms are even more likely to work in larger firms.

3.3.1 Very few firms grow from 1 to 20 employees

We can use an origin/destination matrix to track the movement of firms between employee size-bands over the decade, from 1 employee to 20+ employees. While it would be interesting to examine large firms' size-bands in more detail, data confidentiality requirements constrain us to choose 20+ as our 'large' category. ³⁹

Most firms (58 per cent) starting with a single employee still had only one employee at the

end of the decade (Table 9). And almost half of those who grew added just one employee. Very few firms achieve 20+ employees from a one-employee start-up – there is only a 1:68 chance (1.5 per cent).

For most of the smaller size-bands the pattern is similar. In short, there is a relatively large likelihood of staying in the size-band of birth, with the chance of a move (in either direction) decaying with 'distance' between size-bands.

The share of firms with more than 20 employees doubled between 1998 and 2008. But only half of the firms born in the 20+ size-band stayed there (43 per cent shrank below 20 employees). So the increase was due to new entrants from smaller size-bands who grew beyond 20 employees. Over half of these

new additions were from firms that started with fewer than five employees. In fact, 1,517 firms out of 72,602 survivor firms 'born' with 1-4 employees made the transition from fewer than five employees in 1998 to 20+ employees in 2008, and 640 of them grew from starting with a single employee.

3.3.2 The distribution of employees changes

Total employment by firms born in 1998 falls from 1.1 million to 644,000 over the decade (Table 10, top row). But survivors experience a growth of jobs from 363,000 to 644,000.

The first two columns in Table 10 show that the distribution of employees across size-bands

at birth for survivors is very similar to that for all start-ups. But the distribution for survivors changes as the cohort evolves (columns 2 and 3). Firms grow larger, so the distribution contracts at the small end and expands at the large end. In other words, the share of employment in firms with one employee falls from 12.4 to 5.5 per cent, while the share for firms with 20+ employees increases from 48.2 to 62.7 per cent.

The comparison between shares in the last column with the shares in the second column provides a useful insight into the pattern of employment growth by size-band. The final column of Table 10 shows the result of re-distributing the 643,852 employees of the 2008 survivors from their 2008 size-bands into their size-bands at birth. So, for example, we allocate to size-band 1 the employees of firms now 20+ but born size 1; similarly we allocate to size-band 1 the employees of firms born size 1 but now size 10-19; and so on. As a result we can see that the share of employment in survivors employing 20+ employees which started with one employee doubled (from 12.4 per cent to 25.5 per cent) over the decade, whilst the employment share of survivors born in the 20+ size-band almost halved (from 48.2 per cent to 29.5 per cent).

These results connect directly with the change in the size distribution of firms discussed earlier: the employment share of firms which employed one person at birth but are 20+ employees in 2008 will necessarily have increased; and the converse will be true of firms with 20+ employees which have slipped into a smaller size-band. Whilst this comparison provides an overview of survivors' growth, to understand the detail we need to examine the matrix of connections between the distribution of survivors' employment by size-band at birth and the distribution by size-band in 2008, the subject to which we now turn.

3.3.3 Where did the jobs in 2008 come from?

An origin/destination matrix by size-band for employees can improve our understanding of the changes in the distribution of jobs as firms move between size-bands. This matrix (constructed along the same lines as that for firms) has origins in the rows, destinations in the columns, and all the entries expressed as ratios (in per cent) to the 2008 employee total (Table 11). The margins of this table correspond to the last two columns in Table 10 - the final column is shares in 2008 employment by 1998 size-band and the bottom row is shares in 2008 employment by 2008 size-band. We now populate the rest of the matrix.

The column of greatest interest here is, of course, that for the 20+ employee size-band which accounts for almost two-thirds of all employees. Just under half of the employment in the 20+ size-band is accounted for by firms which started with at least 20 employees.

However, the relative importance of the contribution of the smallest start-ups is striking: those with a single employee at start-up alone contribute 10 percentage points, and those with 2-4 employees another 7 percentage points between them.

So, firms with fewer than ten employees at birth contributed about a quarter of the jobs in the 20+ category in 2008. Even more significant though is that firms born with fewer than five employees accounted for 17 per cent of all the jobs in the 20+ category in 2008.

3.3.4 Growth trajectories of larger survivors

We now take a closer look at those surviving firms in the 1998 cohort that employed 20 or more people in 2008, examining their evolution over the decade. Figure 21 shows how the average number of employees in each firm size category at birth grew between 1998 and 2008 using a log scale.⁴⁰

Employee start-ups that reach the 20+ threshold grow extremely fast, particularly when young. By 2001, when these firms were three years old, this group had gone from one employee to 50 employees on average. After the initial spurt, growth slowed and over the next seven years this group of firms averaged about 10 per cent growth a year, reaching 100 employees by 2008.

None of the other groups recorded such a striking surge in growth as those born with one employee, although all of those starting life with fewer than ten employees had around 20 employees by 2001, and by 2008 had between 50 and 75 employees.

Remarkably, the firms born with between two and nine employees are very similar in both their growth trajectories and their employment size in 2008. So there is no evidence of any systematic association over time between size at birth and growth for small firms that achieve the 20+ employee threshold.

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

At the top of the plot (in Figure 21) we can see that firms born with 20+ employees (average size at birth of about 130 employees) grow very little over the decade: on average about 3.3 per cent per year and by 2008 they had grown to just 179 employees.

3.4 Summary

The analysis of the 1998 cohort of almost a quarter of a million start-ups in the UK shows that relatively few firms record multiple instances of 'high-growth' (i.e. a 20 per cent increase in employment in any one year). Indeed, few firms record more than two instances of high-growth over a ten-year period.

When we look at the relationship between business growth and survival the picture that emerges is dramatic. Firms recording at least one year of 'high-growth' in the cohort of 1998 start-ups are significantly more likely to survive than those firms not having any occurrence of high-growth.

Few firms experience a significant change in their size over the decade. Well over half (58 per cent) of the start-ups with one employee in 1998 still had a single employee ten years later. Almost half of those that grew added just one employee and movement into the 20+ category from a one-employee start-up was very rare. Over the decade 1,517 survivor firms made the transition from fewer than five employees in 1998 to 20+ employees, and only 640 of them grew from size 1 employee at birth.

But those firms born with one employee which achieved the 20+ employees threshold experienced extremely quick growth, and by their third year had an average of 50 employees. After the initial spurt, growth slowed and over the next seven years this group of firms averaged about 10 per cent growth a year, and reached 100 employees by 2008.

None of the other groups of firms who reached the 20+ employee threshold recorded such a striking surge in growth as those born with one employee, although all of those starting life at fewer than ten employees had around 20 employees by 2001, and by 2008 had between 50 and 75 employees.

Part 4: Conclusions

4.1 Introduction

For the first time we have been able to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the number and nature of high-growth firms in the UK economy.

We now know that in both time periods 2002-05 and 2005-08 there were around 11,500 high-growth firms in the UK (or ~20,000 using a turnover-based measure of growth). This represents around 6 per cent of the total number of surviving businesses in both time periods and is a slightly greater proportion of firms than the 5.2 per cent reported for the US in 2005.

Here we do two things. First, to set out some of the policy implications arising from this initial analysis of the UK business demography dataset and second, to make some suggestions on how our knowledge of high-growth firms and the growth dynamic within individual firms can be deepened.

4.2 Policy discussion – lessons for policy in an economic downturn?

It may seem strange to talk in terms of high-growth firms during a recession when many firms are in the process of retrenchment, decline and closure, but there are important lessons from this research which may serve to inform policymakers.

1. We have now quantified the number of high-growth firms in the UK economy to add to our understanding of processes by which growth takes place. Further, we have arrived at some broad measures of their economic contribution through an analysis of job creation. Overall, these 11,500 high-growth firms were responsible for the creation of around half of the net employment change in existing businesses in the UK in the years before the current recession.
2. The relative rarity of high-growth firms in the UK economy is common across the developed economies and makes the task of finding them and working with them very difficult. This is consistent with the long-established view that, since research has failed to identify, ex-ante, the distinctive features of fast growth firms, "a selective policy of support for small firms is simply unworkable" because it is "not feasible on operational grounds, neither at the business start-up stage nor later on when the small firm has begun to expand into a sizeable company" (Hakim, 1989). That continues to be the nature of the challenge facing policymakers at national and regional level in the UK.
3. However, the results show that supporting high-growth firms is perhaps a better policy option in terms of job creation than a general business support policy for all SMEs many of whom have achieved only modest growth. So whenever feasible, government-funded business support should be targeted at businesses that have the potential to grow. And policymakers should continue to develop policies that facilitate the emergence of high-growth firms and which do not require their identification ex-ante.
4. Young firms are more likely to achieve high-growth, but the majority of high-growth firms have been established for many years. This suggests that if we are looking to stimulate growth in the private sector, we need to look not only at young firms but also to the established stock of businesses. After all, around 80 per cent of the jobs created by high-growth firms were created by firms older than five years.
5. High-growth firms engage in diverse activities and are not only involved in the high-tech sectors such as nanotechnology and biotechnology. So, while there are reasons to support the development of high-growth businesses in a few promising sectors, 'traditional sectors' should not be forgotten. In fact, Business Services and the Wholesale and Retail sector provide almost half the high-growth firms in the UK, while Manufacturing is a source of just over one in ten high-growth firms.
6. A small number of new micro-enterprises in 1998 made an important contribution to net job creation in surviving businesses employing 20 or more employees ten years later. This underlines the importance in policy terms of continuing to support small-scale start-ups in the current economic climate.

Clearly, there are still many unanswered questions relating to high-growth firms but we now have some clear insights from the UK firm-level data of where we might look for the answers. All we have done is set out some basic measurement indicators on high-growth. The task now is to understand more about the drivers of that growth and the overall efficiency of these firms. We cannot possibly infer behaviour and strategy from the stylised facts presented in this report regarding size, age, sector and region. While many of drivers and barriers (e.g. skills and knowledge, innovation, access to finance, business networks and culture) to growth have been identified, the task remains to be investigated more thoroughly and rigorously with the application of econometric techniques (BERR, 2008).

Therefore, the next stage for researchers would involve undertaking a more detailed analysis of the 11,500 high-growth firms and the small number of 1998 start-ups who grew rapidly over the decade. In particular, three initial questions need to be urgently addressed:

• How has the current publicly-financed business support offer across the UK been involved in the process of growth in these high-growth firms over the last ten years?
• Who are the owners and managers running these firms and to what extent are these firms independent and UK-based?
• How has this growth been funded, and in particular, has there been any involvement of the formal and informal equity markets operating in the UK?

References

• Acs, Z., Parsons, W. and Spencer, T. (2008) 'High Impact Firms: Gazelles Revisited.' Washington DC: Office of Advocacy, US Small Business Administrations.
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• Davidsson, P., Achtenhagen, L. and Naldi, L. (2006) 'What do we know about small firm growth?' In Parker, S. (Ed.) 'The Life Cycle of Entrepreneurial Ventures.' New York: Springer. pp.361-398.
• Davies, R. (2006) 'Business Structure Database User Guide V1.' Newport: ONS VML.
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• EUROSTAT-OECD (2007) 'usiness Demography Manual.' Paris: EUROSTAT-OECD.
• FORA (2008) 'Manual for Growth Indicators Project.' Copenhagen: FORA.
• Gallagher, C. and Miller, P. (1991) 'The performance of new firms in Scotland and the South East, 1980-7'. 'Royal Bank of Scotland Review.' 170, pp.38-50.
• Hakim, C. (1989) 'Identifying fast growth small firms.' 'Employment Gazette.' January, pp.29-41.
• Hart, M. and McGuinness, S. (2003) 'Small Firm Growth in the UK Regions: towards and explanatory framework'. 'Regional Studies.' 37, 2, pp.109-122.
• Hart, M., Driffield, N.L., Roper, S. and Mole, K. (2008a) 'Evaluation of Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) and its successor, Selective Finance for Investment in England (SFIE).' BERR Occasional Paper No. 2, February 2008. London: BERR.
• Hart, M., Driffield, N.L., Roper, S. and Mole, K. (2008b) 'Evaluation of Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) in Scotland: 2000-04.' Edinburgh: Scottish Executive Social Research: Business and Industry.
• Henrekson, M. and Johansson, D. (2008) 'Gazelles as job creators: a survey and interpretation of the evidence.' Working Paper 733. Stockholm: Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
• Henrekson, M. and Johansson, D. (2009) 'Gazelles as job creators: a survey and interpretation of the evidence'. 'Small Business Economics.' February (DOI 10.1007/s11187-009-9172-z).
• Mason, C.M. (1985) 'The geography of 'successful' small firms in the United Kingdom'. 'Environment and Planning.' A, pp.1499-1513.
• Mason, G., Bishop, K. and Robinson, C. (2009) 'Business Growth and Innovation.' London: NESTA.
• OECD (1998) 'Fostering Entrepreneurship.' Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
• Vaessen, P. and Keeble, D. (1995) 'Growth-oriented SMEs in unfavourable regional environments'. 'Regional Studies.' 29, pp.489-505.

Appendix 1: UK firm growth rates tables

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Footnotes

Table A9: Distribution of firms across employment growth categories by sector. 10+ employees. Period: 2002-05

Source: ONS Business Structure Database. Note: * in a cell indicates a disclosive figure i.e. cell count of <10. Where there is only one disclosive figure per column or row the totals are also replaced with * to prevent secondary disclosure through subtraction or addition.

Table A10: Distribution of firms across employment growth categories by sector. 10+ employees. Period: 2005-08

Source: ONS Business Structure Database. Note: * in a cell indicates a disclosive figure i.e. cell count of <10. Where there is only one disclosive figure per column or row the totals are also replaced with * to prevent secondary disclosure through subtraction or addition.

Table A11: Distribution of firms across employment growth categories by region. All firms. Period: 2002-05

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Table A12: Distribution of firms across employment growth categories by region. All firms. Period: 2005-08

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Table A13: Distribution of firms across employment growth categories by region. 10+ employees. Period: 2002-05

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Table A14: Distribution of firms across employment growth categories by region. 10+ employees. Period: 2005-08

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Table A15: Distribution of firms across employment growth categories by initial size. All firms. Period: 2002-05

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Table A16: Distribution of firms across turnover growth categories by initial size. All firms. Period: 2005-08

Source: ONS Business Structure Database.

Acknowledgements

This report was written by: Dr Michael Anyadike-Danes, Head of Research in the Economic Research Centre of Northern Ireland (ERINI); Karen Bonner, Senior Research Economist in ERINI; Professor Mark Hart, Chair of Small Business and Entrepreneurship in the Economics and Strategy Group, Aston Business School, Aston University; and Professor Colin Mason, Research Director and Chair of Entrepreneurship in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, University of Strathclyde.

The research team would like to acknowledge the critical role of Albert Bravo-Biosca of NESTA who has been an invaluable mentor to the research team throughout this project.

The analysis contained in this report is compiled from the newly created business demography database in the UK which has been constructed from annual snapshots of the live Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) Business Structure Database (BSD)⁴¹. We would like to thank the staff of the MAUS (ONS VML) and in particular Bob Gillhooley, Richard Welpton, Rhys Davies and Felix Ritchie for their assistance in helping us develop a deeper understanding of the BSD.

NESTA 1 Plough Place London EC4A 1DE [email protected] www.nesta.org.uk

Published: October 2009 MBG/35

ISBN 978-1-84875-058-6

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Footnotes