It's all about growth – an empirical status report of business development

Abstract

While business development (BD) is currently a widely spread term among practitioners, to date BD has received only little attention in scientific research. The objective of our study is to improve current knowledge on BD by analysing the status quo of BD in practice. Therefore, we conduct a descriptive quantitative empirical study on a cross-industry basis with 352 German companies. Specifically, the analysis focuses on understanding, activities, organisation, people, instruments as well as challenges and future relevance of BD. Our results indicate that BD is understood as the search for growth opportunities in four key dimensions: products, processes, markets and/or business models. It has top management access, highly skilled people with diverse backgrounds, who mainly apply instruments found in management literature. Main challenges in BD result from a paucity of human and financial resources. Yet in the future, BD is of increasing relevance for firms.