Building high tech small firms to become: News from the High Technology Small Firms conference, University [of] Twente, 27–28 May 2019

The High Technology Small Firms (HTSF) conference is a “boutique” conference, small compared to thematically broader entrepreneurship conferences such as the Babson Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research conference (BKERC) and the Research in Entrepreneurship and Small Business conference (RENT), but specialized on the topics of the emergence and the management of HTSFs. The HTSF conference is driven by the fact that these firms play a significant role in economic growth and structural change (Malerba and Orsenigo, 1995). For example, the high-growth startups among the HTSFs contribute over-proportionally to the employment growth that is created by a startup cohort (Birch, 1987). To succeed, HTSFs can build on their unique strengths, such as their high degree of flexibility. However, HTSFs face the liabilities of smallness, and some those of newness as well, when they deal with market and technological uncertainties.

Moreover, many HTSFs do not work in isolation but need to be embedded in technology and innovation ecosystems, which creates issues of liabilities of outsidership. The tension between the benefits and liabilities creates the management challenges for HTSF (Harms, 2009) at the interface between technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and small business management (Solomon and Linton, 2016). This interface sketches the themes covered by the HTSF conference.