European fast growing mid-sized firms: a policy meeting by RISIS project

On 24 October 2019, the Club of associated research organisations (Clora) of Brussels will host the first RISIS Policymakers’ Session. The European Research Infrastructure for Science, technology and Innovation policy Studies (RISIS) will focus on European mid-size firms, with a half-day presentation and discussion around evidence from RISIS Cheetah data.

Massimiliano Guerini, representative of Politecnico di Milano (Polimi) in RISIS project and Cheetah access manager and Roberto Camerani, Research Fellow at Science Policy Research Unit of University of Sussex, will like to present a category of firms that may be relevant for policy debate: Cheetah firms.

Fast growing firms have received considerable attention by academic scholars and policymakers for their crucial role in creating new jobs and employment. However, firm performance appears to be highly skewed, and most firms do not experience fast or high growth, determinants of high growth are difficult to predict, and the high growth tends not to persist over time. Furthermore, have been studied several characteristics of these firms, including their size, age, sector, or country.

Cheetah firms represent a critical dimension in employment creation and an important policy focus for the future. The event will address this issue based on original data about a large sample of fast growing mid-sized firms in Europe.

Speakers will first describe the methodology for data collection. Then, they will move to the main findings obtained when analysing the RISIS Cheetah database, with a descriptive analysis on the distribution of fast growing mid-sized firms in Europe, including a comparison with the distribution of mid-sized firms that did not experience fast growth, and an analysis on the regional-level factors that are associated to the emergence and agglomeration of fast growing mid-sized firms in European regions. In the final section, will be discussed the policy implications of the analyses.

 

The Session will start at 14.00, at Clora Salle DELVAUX, (Avenue des Arts 8, 1210 Brussels), and will finish at 17.00. The final programme and the registration form are available here.