Strategy planning for high‐growth firms: A complexity theoretic framework

Abstract

Many entrepreneurial theories suggest that corporate growth is not taking place in a continuous manner but in a rather disruptive way. Since many strategy planning frameworks implicitly assume that their underlying assumptions are not changing overtime this stands in some contradictory relation to growth transitions in rapidly growing firms. Hence, this paper proposes an approach called “Growth Scorecards” which is based on the Balanced Scorecard methodology and enables decision makers of high‐growth enterprises to identify the necessity and approximate scope of strategic revisions associated with a growth transition. The described approach therefore employs complexity‐theoretic concepts in order to classify the management’s propensity for growth measures as the internal likelihood of a growth transition. As a prerequisite for this the paper starts with a disquisition of the theoretic framework underlying this approach.