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The purpose of this paper is to examine business growth and explore the “growth mode” among 24 women entrepreneurs participating in a Nordic research, development and networking programme.

A longitudinal design made it possible to follow entrepreneurial growth as an unfolding and emerging research process with a methodology inductive in nature and driven by empirical findings. The analysis is structured following established procedures for inductive, theory-building research, using guidelines for constant comparison techniques and working recursively between the data and the emerging theory.

Two processes were found important to understand the women entrepreneurs’ growth mode. The first is interpreted as intentionally driven and relates to the women’s achievement of expanding their knowledge reservoir; the other is non-intentionally driven and a result of uncontrolled network responses. The latter unfolded as a movement towards a preferable macro-actor status for some of the entrepreneurs.

The study calls attention to relevant knowledge preferable to entrepreneurs who face challenges when trying to grow their businesses. The political implications of this study relate to the importance of awareness among governmental organizations and municipal business advisers regarding the effects of entrepreneurial networking.

This study provides an empirically rigorous insight into the processes of entrepreneurial growth. The findings led the authors to develop a conceptual model for business growth, which contributes to the recent stream of literature on how new businesses are growing.

During the last decade, there has been an increasing focus on commercialization of knowledge and technology from universities. However, universities report financing as being the main impediment to successful university spin‐off companies (USOs) creation, leaving valuable inventions un‐commercialized. The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model in order to explain financing challenges experienced by USOs.

This paper presents a conceptual model illustrating financing challenges met by USOs, and provides an explanation why TTOs report that obtaining financing is their biggest impediment to spin‐off creation. Two different theoretical perspectives back this conceptual development: Knightian uncertainty and agency theory.

This theoretical examination suggests that increasing levels of uncertainty affect the investor's willingness to fund new companies in a negative way. Through the literature review, clear indications were also found for the increased uncertainty with which USOs are faced. It is therefore natural to conclude that investors are more reluctant to invest in USOs because of the level of uncertainty compared with other entrepreneurial companies.

This study made a generalization of USOs as a homogeneous group of companies, which is an oversimplification. Further research should address how different business models, types of resources and their institutional link affect USOs' capital requirements and their problems in raising the required capital.

The main contribution from this paper is the combination of theoretical insights from the concepts of Knightian uncertainty and agency theory. These combined with insights from previous empirical studies explain why USOs face specific challenges in order to raise risk capital.

This paper seeks to add to our understanding of how entrepreneurs can build “knowledge reservoirs” to achieve competitive advantage. The study focus upon the following issues: what kind of actors can be found in various entrepreneurs' knowledge reservoirs, and what business knowledge do these actors possess.

The author employs a longitudinal case study approach, involving a sample of seven entrepreneurs in new technology‐based firms, each interviewed two times during the period from 1999 to 2001.

Evidence suggests that entrepreneurs should build knowledge reservoirs, segmented into internal, semi‐internal and external knowledge reservoirs. These reservoirs should be a means to gain competition advantage.

The conceptual model has both empirical and theoretical backing, but the empirical backing is limited to seven cases. It would be useful to test the conceptual model on larger sample sizes.

Practitioners can focus on how to build knowledge reservoirs, while the model helps to increase awareness of the holistic view of entrepreneurial knowledge and which actors can contribute to it. Policy makers should encourage entrepreneurs to build knowledge reservoirs, and support systems could require a plan for this activity before entrepreneurs get access to public funds.

The paper makes four main contributions: model generation, development of terminology, further development of the field of entrepreneurial research, and development of RBT.