Factors and circumstances affecting the business performance of firms based on new technologies

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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.

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    • Figure 1. Factors affecting the performance of NTBFs and problems with production capacity, accompanying services, suppliers, and financing
    • Conceptualization
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Data curation
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Formal Analysis
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Funding acquisition
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Investigation
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Methodology
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Project administration
      Štefan Slavik
    • Resources
      Štefan Slavik
    • Software
      Štefan Slavik
    • Supervision
      Štefan Slavik
    • Validation
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Visualization
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova
    • Writing – original draft
      Štefan Slavik
    • Writing – review & editing
      Štefan Slavik, Veronika Bednarova