Štefan Slavik

New technology-based firms (NTBFs) invent, develop, and commercialize original technologies whose research, development, and commercial success is highly uncertain and risky. Their growth is lengthy and often insufficient, but investors’ growth expectations are high. The study aims to determine factors and circumstances that affect the growth of new technology-based firms. The source of knowledge is a personal experience from a guided interview with the founder, which is recorded in the questionnaire. The research sample includes 67 NTBFs doing business in Slovakia. The respondents’ statements were analyzed using critical discourse analysis (CDA) with the support of artificial intelligence. The results are the factors that influence the business performance of the investigated companies. The performance of companies that show a long-term loss is affected by very limited access to financial resources, restrictive regulations, and a lack of qualified employees. The performance of companies that show a long-term profit is influenced by favorable access to external capital, effective management of human resources, optimization of internal processes, and improvement of marketing. The order of the identified factors expresses their importance in the thematic group. The secondary results are the accompanying circumstances of the growth of the investigated companies, namely the reasons for the establishment of NTBF and entry into business, commercialization of new technology, and cooperation with investors and banks. The combination of limited access to finance and a lack of qualified human resources creates a complex set of obstacles to the business performance of NTBFs.

Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic and Slovak Academy of Sciences (VEGA) under the grant “Accelerating the growth of innovative enterprises - scaling up scale-ups and new technology-based firms (NTBFs)”, number 1/0006/22.