| The growth of firm is the shared question of common concern of managers and researchers. In order to get a healthy growth, firms must identify their own states. Using a systematic and dynamic method to evaluate the states is meaningful for firm research and management practice.Based on a great amount of literature reviews, the author identifies two main problems. The indexes in the growth stage theory are too simple to evaluate a firm. Additionally, the indexes in the comprehensive evaluation theory are static so that they can't meet the need of growth evaluation. Therefore, the author believes that a new systematic evaluation index system is needed, which must be comprehensive to reflect the changes of components of a firm through growth phase.On the basis of literature review, the author divides the firm into seven subsystems that are interrelated and interacted. Second and third level indexes are constructed and the questionnaire is designed, then a pre-investigation is processed according to the theoretical analysis and experts' suggestions, such as researchers of firm growth, managers in practice and senior management consultants. In addition, the author uses SPSS 13.0 for Windows to make reliability and validity analysis on the data obtained from the questionnaire surveys in empirical research. Finally, the results indicate that the evaluation index system is reasonable and applicable.The author also starts an empirical research into the method to apply the system. The following methods are used in the data analysis: 1) variance analysis to show whether there is a significant difference among importance of indexes of the firms in different types and stages, 2) discrimination analysis to give reference value to indexes and give a discrimination function to judge the stage of a firm, 3) correlation analysis to show the relationship between the state of subsystems and the stage of firms. At last, an evaluation process is explored after giving a summary to the methods above. |
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