Knowledge-based Business Growth

With the increasing of uncertainty and complexity of environment, the key factors and hypothesis of firm growth is changing. Now the key factor of firm is knowledge, the challenge the firm faced is how to accumulate and create knowledge to adapt to the environment quickly.What the essay focused on is firm growth, through views of the nature of the firm, the content of firm growth and the process of firm growth, the essay can describe and explain the key questions of firm growth. The essay uses the theory of reductionism and system science to build a Holistic framework, in which combined the process with the mechanism of firm growth, and applying co-evolution methodology as the basic theoretical approaches to discuss how people play a active role in create conditions to accumulate and create knowledge in order to influence and induce the path of firm growth.The essay is composed of eight chapters, the main contents in chapters as follows: the first chapter is the part of introduction, from chapter two to chapter seven constitutes the theoretical analysis parts, chapter eight is the empirical part.As the introduction section of the whole thesis, chapter one raises the core issues of for study based on analysis of fundamental background and intention of study. Moreover integral contents and its arrangements are introduced.Chapter two introduces theories about firm growth, and knowledge characteristics, based on these the essay concludes that the nature of firm growth is a dynamic process of knowledge accumulation and creation with path dependence with people partly controlling.Chapter three constructs a model of firm growth, including process of growth and growth mechanism, so as to reveal the system and parts of firm growth rules. Chapter four uses all kinds of methodology from self organizing theories to describe the total rules of firm growth. Chapter five discuss the growth mechanism including cognition, organization learning and networking. The aim is to let people play active role in controlling process condition so as to influence or induce the path of firm growth.Chapter six discusses why firm often fails to growth, the essay think the reason is inertia. Firm can change the existed mind model and routines to avoid inertia, so that firm can realize leap in growth process.Chapter seven sponsor several strategy to realize the firm growth mechanisms, such as alliance strategy, learning strategy and knowledge sharing and knowledge creation strategy.Chapter eight is the empirical part of this essay. Based on historical analysis and narrative approach, I use software sector and typical firm-microsoft as example, in order to better understand the relationship between growth mechanism and growth process. Through in-depth case study, we concern the sequential nature of interrelationships and view firm growth as an ongoing sequence of adaptations by firms based on complexity science.