Regionale und unternehmensspezifische Faktoren einer hohen Wachstumsdynamik von IKT Unternehmen in Deutschland

The information and communication technology (ICT) is a cross-section technology. ICT accelerate structural change and has a revitalizing effect especially in advanced economies. For Germany, it is therefore important not to leave behind on the fast growing ICT market and to produce a high number of fast growing ICT companies itself. In this analysis, 200 ICT companies based in Germany were interviewed to find out which company-specific factors have a measurable direct impact on corporate growth. Also regional determinants were included. The analysis found that firm age and size, export ratio, expenditure on research and development, product innovation, venture capital and concrete cooperation between companies have a directly positive effect on the growth of ICT companies. While active participation in an ICT cluster has a negative impact on company growth or to be more precisely, it appears that predominant low growth ICT companies operating active in clusters. This leads to interesting implications for policy makers, which see the active support of cluster development as an adequate instrument to stimulate innovations.