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Diss. Jönköping : Internationella handelshögsk., 2007.

If company wants to improve its market share and raise its earnings it has to expand. The only way to expand is taking the given opportunities. The goal of this thesis is the evaluation of business activities expansion of a company, and possible growth strategies of a small company.

<p>lululemon athletica is a yoga inspired athletic clothing company. Since lululemon’s retail inception in 2000, the company has been quite successful; it has grown to sixty- four store and showrooms locations and has doubled revenue every year for the last four years. A lululemon core value is entrepreneurship. This thesis explores this entrepreneurial value focusing primarily on an individual retail location manager perspective. The entrepreneurial concepts utilized to explore entrepreneurship are: entrepreneurial ori- entation (EO), entrepreneurial management, company growth, entrepreneurship preservation, and corporate entrepreneurship.</p><p>Three empirical instruments assessing entrepreneurial concepts are employed in this thesis: Entrepreneurial Orientation, Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship, and a presented recombination of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship concept. The EO instrument considers the dimensions pioneered by Miller (1983) and Dess and Lumpkin (1996) and includes: innovation, risk-taking, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy. Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship is assessed by the Operationalization of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship scale developed by Brown et al. (2001) which determines management style proclivity between an entrepreneurial or administrative style.</p><p>The third empirical study recombines the Brown et al. (2001) instrument in an attempt to explore a possible ambidextrous management function of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship concept.</p><p>Results from the empirical studies depict lululemon as an entrepreneurial organisation. The EO study results show that lululemon emphasizes innovative and proactive behaviours. The Operationalization of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship scale determined that lululemon slightly favours an entrepreneurial management style. The presented ambidexterity instrument reveals individual location managers to be capable of ambidextrous management.</p><p>Two possible contributions to entrepreneurship study are proposed in this thesis. Analysis of the entrepreneurial orientation concept within lululemon realized a need for a communication and coordination EO dimension to be added to the existing dimensions. Also, the recombination of the Brown et al. (2001) instrument provides an alternate measurement scale assessing management ambidexterity.</p>

In today’s dynamic business environment, stakeholders are seen as essential and companies are expected to engage stakeholders in mutually productive areas such as innovation and product development, market and sales development, sustainability, etc. However, prior literature of stakeholder engagement has mainly focused on large companies and the benefits of stakeholder engagement are usually narrowed to one specific area of growth. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the micro level of start-up companies and examines benefits of stakeholder engagement in terms of different aspects of company growth (namely financial performance, product development and innovation, marketing/sales development, reputation, sustainability and CSR, knowledge learning and information.).   Literature review of concepts of stakeholder engagement, start-ups and company growth has led to the theoretical framework of the thesis. It serves as guidance for the overall methodology. In order to meet the research objectives, we conduct a qualitative exploratory study on eight Swedish start-ups from different industries and with different characteristics. The data collection technique we use is semi-structured interviews with the eight owners (CEOs) of the start-ups. Through the interviews we examined the stakeholders that start-up companies are engaging, the benefits of engaging different stakeholders, the costs which may prevent them from engagement and the relationships between stakeholder engagement and their company growth.   The thesis has found that start-ups do engage different stakeholders for various growth aspects, and identified major focus areas and main stakeholders that start-ups attach more importance to than others. Customers and suppliers are frequently mentioned for driving product, market and sales development, which leads to direct financial growth. Owner-managers, employees and investors are in the second group of growth drivers, while the third group includes personal network, government organizations and communities. Meanwhile, the thesis has also categorized the benefits of stakeholder engagement into two groups according to the relative importance found out. Market and sales development, innovation and product development and financial performance are the primary, more frequently mentioned benefits than sustainability/CSR, Knowledge Learning/Information and reputation. Thus, the thesis has extended the theoretical framework by fitting it to the start-up context. The thesis has contributed to prior literature by reinforcing the prior research on stakeholder engagement and also filling the research gap in micro start-up company context. The thesis can give practical implications to start-up companies in terms of how to engagement stakeholders to drive company growth. We could conclude that start-up company context carries certain difference from large companies in stakeholder engagement, and start-ups should be encouraged to engage stakeholders more to drive company growth.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key characteristics of successful innovation, analyse the innovation process in Unilever and provide set of recommendations for the company. This paper addresses a key question of current business -- how to achieve growth of a company via innovation. The thesis is based on the already published research for identifying the best practices in dealing with innovation, survey with strategic innovation leaders in HHC Unilever, interviews with employees of Unilever, published articles and researches on Unilever and internal documents of the company. Findings indicate that the key characteristics of successful innovators are the corporate culture, innovation strategy, human resources management, structures, evaluation of ideas, processes and metrics. Several improvements were suggested for HHC Unilever. The value of this paper is in the development of an action framework for the delivery of accelerated growth of the company when using innovation. The analysis conducted on Unilever may be replicated to other companies in order to analyse status of their innovative activities.

lululemon athletica is a yoga inspired athletic clothing company. Since lululemon’s retail inception in 2000, the company has been quite successful; it has grown to sixty- four store and showrooms locations and has doubled revenue every year for the last four years. A lululemon core value is entrepreneurship. This thesis explores this entrepreneurial value focusing primarily on an individual retail location manager perspective. The entrepreneurial concepts utilized to explore entrepreneurship are: entrepreneurial ori- entation (EO), entrepreneurial management, company growth, entrepreneurship preservation, and corporate entrepreneurship. Three empirical instruments assessing entrepreneurial concepts are employed in this thesis: Entrepreneurial Orientation, Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship, and a presented recombination of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship concept. The EO instrument considers the dimensions pioneered by Miller (1983) and Dess and Lumpkin (1996) and includes: innovation, risk-taking, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy. Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship is assessed by the Operationalization of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship scale developed by Brown et al. (2001) which determines management style proclivity between an entrepreneurial or administrative style. The third empirical study recombines the Brown et al. (2001) instrument in an attempt to explore a possible ambidextrous management function of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship concept. Results from the empirical studies depict lululemon as an entrepreneurial organisation. The EO study results show that lululemon emphasizes innovative and proactive behaviours. The Operationalization of Stevenson’s Entrepreneurship scale determined that lululemon slightly favours an entrepreneurial management style. The presented ambidexterity instrument reveals individual location managers to be capable of ambidextrous management. Two possible contributions to entrepreneurship study are proposed in this thesis. Analysis of the entrepreneurial orientation concept within lululemon realized a need for a communication and coordination EO dimension to be added to the existing dimensions. Also, the recombination of the Brown et al. (2001) instrument provides an alternate measurement scale assessing management ambidexterity.

Lic.-avh. Stockholm : Tekniska högskolan, 2004.

Diss. Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2006.

The label entrepreneur is often used for the founder of a firm. Do owner-managers of small firms then remain entrepreneurial? Do they actually innovate, expand, and start additional ventures? While there are clear signs that small firms are of increasing importance to the economy, several studies suggest that the willingness among small firm managers to pursue goals for growth and development is limited. At the same time, some of them certainly continue to behave entrepreneurially. This empirical study focuses on explanations of continued entrepreneurship – and its absence – in small firms. Some of the issues addressed are: Which characteristics of the manager, the firm, the industry, and the environment promote, and which restrain small firm growth? Is it possible to delineate groups of more and less entrepreneurial small firms? Does the high-tech category represent a new and more entrepreneurial type of small firm? More than 400 managers of small firms were interviewed for this dissertation. Data on structural factors were collected from external sources. While using micro-level data, the study aims at building knowledge that is useful at the macro-level. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk.</p>