Entrepreneurial Orientation and Sustainable Growth of Firms: Evidence from Emerging Economies

Sustainable firm growth is a shared objective of multiple stakeholders and a fundamental basis for long-term economic development.However, in practice, many firms experience growth without sustainability, often facing stagnation, decline, or failure after an initial expansion phase.This phenomenon is widely observed across countries, industries, and firm types, indicating the limitations of existing explanations of firm growth.Although prior studies in economics and management-such as neoclassical theory, contract theory, resource-based theory, lifecycle theory, and evolutionary theory-have provided valuable insights into firm growth and competitiveness, they remain insufficient in explaining how established firms overcome organizational inertia and achieve renewed, sustainable growth.Drawing on an entrepreneurial perspective, this study aims to address these theoretical gaps by emphasizing the role of opportunity recognition, entrepreneurial behavior, and continuous innovation in sustaining firm growth.While existing theories acknowledge the importance of entrepreneurship for firm survival and development, they rarely examine entrepreneurial activities systematically, particularly in the context of mature firms.Moreover, entrepreneurship research has only recently begun to connect entrepreneurial processes with long-term firm growth, leaving the mechanisms of sustainability underexplored.This study develops an integrated analytical framework that explains sustainable firm growth as a dynamic process driven by entrepreneurship.It examines firm formation and early growth through entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation, analyzes intrapreneurship as a mechanism for endogenous growth in established firms, and explores corporate entrepreneurial investment as a pathway for exogenous growth, strategic renewal, and business diversification.Based on these analyses, the study proposes a general process model of entrepreneurship-based sustainable firm growth and reinterprets traditional lifecycle and growth limit theories from a sustainability perspective.The findings contribute to entrepreneurship and management research by offering a coherent theoretical explanation of how firms achieve sustainable growth in changing environments.