Environmental pioneers can still dominate markets reluctant to reward them. They may be eco-friendly, but clean tech companies confront hostile markets. In order to prevail, they will need to attract customers prepared to pay more for a green product, perform better than competitors, and change the rules of the game.
Posted on Monday, September 05, 2011
Flemish growth companies are doing better than their counterparts in Western Europe and worldwide. They are more proactive, flexible and alert, and respond more quickly. They think the worst of the crisis is past, and are looking very hopefully to the future. Those are the findings of the annual iGMO Growth Survey by the Growth Management Impulse Centre for Medium-Sized Companies by Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School jointly with Ernst & Young and KBC, covering around 80 Flemish owner-managed growth companies – all members of iGMO.
Posted on Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The demolition of tariff barriers in manufacturing industries promises rich pickings across the world for new ventures - but are entrepreneurs actually taking up the challenge by launching firms to tap into international markets? Globalization offers manufacturers undeniable opportunities by putting established players under competitive pressure while providing new prospects in international markets. Yet while opening markets up to foreign competition may fuel growing trade in industrialized countries, are their entrepreneurs picking up the gauntlet?
Posted on Wednesday, April 20, 2011
This article analyses the growth performance of a number of entrepreneurial firms in 10 manufacturing sectors of 11 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The focus of the article is on identifying the entrepreneurial attributes and company characteristics that tend to generate a significant number of high-growth firms (HGFs) in these countries. The authors investigate to what extent certain co-variates may affect the conditional distribution of company growth rates more fundamentally. They focus not only on the factors that systematically increase the ‘mean’ growth rates of firms, but also on the factors that tend to stretch the right tail of the conditional distribution of growth rates – in other words, factors that tend to generate a significant number of high-growth firms.
Posted on Thursday, March 17, 2011
The global scale of the GEM survey enables regions and countries to make comparisons with each other with regard to the new entrepreneurial climate. The GEM survey is unique in that it not only focuses on the number of persons that have founded a company but also on the number of persons that are in the process of starting a company that has not yet become a formal entity. The goal of the GEM report for Belgium and Flanders (2009) is to provide a quantitative as well as a qualitative description of the degree of entrepreneurship in Belgium and Flanders. This analysis highlights a number of important conclusions.
Posted on Tuesday, December 07, 2010
While available data seems to suggest that corporate responsibility (CR) is the prerogative of large businesses, there is ample anecdotal evidence that being a small business does not impede corporate responsible behaviour. Jan Lepoutre, Assistant Professor at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, has investigated the impact of firm size on CR engagement. SMEs face particular challenges, but are not lacking in opportunities.
Posted on Monday, September 20, 2010
A large variety of initiatives are striving to stimulate the sense of entrepreneurship in students in secondary education − but do all these well-intentioned projects really make sense? The Effecto study from the Flanders DC Knowledge Centre at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School shows that these initiatives do indeed have an effect, although this can be further increased with small interventions. Moreover, other factors also play a definite role in stimulating entrepreneurship
Posted on Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Many SMEs in Flanders still use an internationalization strategy fitting the traditional stage models in which firms start internationalizing after years of purely domestic operations. For the average SME, international activities start with import after 2 years, followed by export after 9 years and export outside the EU after 13 years. Other forms of internationalization follow later in the firm’s life. Firms that start selling abroad often first enter neighboring countries, in many cases the Netherlands. After a successful first export experience, a number of firms enter other nearby markets. These markets are often larger (e.g. Germany or France) than the first export market
Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010
Growth companies in Flanders are not being affected financially by the crisis. Thanks to an effective approach, they are able to withstand the economic recession. That is the major conclusion of the large growth survey conducted by iGMO (Impulscentrum Groeimanagement voor Middelgrote Ondernemingen / Growth management impulse centre for mid-sized enterprises) at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School. The results are being presented during the iGMO Growth Management Summit 2009 on 18 and 19 June in Oostende. The research was supported by Ernst & Young and KBC.
Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010