Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

High growth firms and reducing innovation barriers figure high on the European innovation policy agenda. In this paper we study the robustness of the perception of innovation barriers when alternative definitions of high growth firms are used. The empirical results show that different definitions of high growth firms lead to substantial different results. We argue that in the light of the available empirical evidence this non-robustness should not come as a surprise and that this negative result has policy implications.