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If it's economic growth you want, particularly when government's in retreat, you'd better find the firms to make it happen for you.

Scottish Enterprise has been trying to do just that, commissioning research into what makes a high-growth firm in Scotland.

The results are interesting, if perhaps a bit frustrating for the government's economic development agency.

It turns out high-growth firms are very diverse, across sectors, in different sizes and at varying stages of development.

That is, they don't all fit the image of the funky, Silicon Valley-style, tech start-up.

That makes them all the harder to spot - which is probably the finding that Scottish Enterprise least wanted, because its strategy is about spotting and helping them.

Quite a few of these firms credited government with giving them a hand up, particularly on export advice and training, but only a fifth were "account managed" by SE at the time of the research.

It was not so much frustrating as a little unfortunate that the research was published on the same day it was announced that PWB Health - maker of the Breastlight cancer detection device, and one of the life science firms that SE had backed with more than 拢1m from its co-investment fund - has been put in administration.

Lumpy progress

So, with the help of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde University, what more can we say about high-growth firms.

It's probably worth defining them first.

Economists - in this case authors Ross Brown and Colin Mason - agree that firms qualify if they start with at least 10 employees and achieve growth of at least 20% per year over the following three years.

A company can be caught by that definition one year but not the next.

Indeed, that's one of the key and unsurprising findings: very few companies sustain a linear growth path, but instead progress in bursts and lumps.

One such burst can come with a management buyout.

Quite a few of the companies in the trawl had been "incubated" under larger, more slow-moving ownership before being spun out.

Over one-third of these companies are less than 15 years old.

The newest ones, founded within the previous five years and known as gazelles, barely registered.

There were only 25 of them, or 3% of the total. It shows at least some patience is required for take-off.

Big payroll

So the important bit: how many are there? There were 825 spotted between April 2006 and April 2009, though the uneven growth of most companies makes that a moving target.

The total represents only 6% of all Scotland's companies employing 10 or more people.

Comparisons with the UK and Scandanavia have a tiresome habit of making Scotland's company growth pattern look relatively bad, but not this time.

At some points in time, Scotland's been doing better on this count than the UK as a whole, and it's in line with Finland and Denmark.

These Scottish companies have a big payroll, of 500,000.

Far from all of them are in Scotland.

One distinctive aspect of this class of company is that it tends to have a big presence outside Scotland.

It's also likely to be export-oriented, and 39% have their ownership outside the UK.

Private, unlisted ownership accounts for 92% of them.

The diversity is clearest in the sectors covered.

Services dominate, covering a third of this group, and as with the rest of this group, they are biggest in business-to-business sales.

Hospitality, manufacturing and construction were next in line, though much of construction will have fallen into the high-decline category since this research began.

Oil and gas takes a perhaps surprisingly small share, with 27 companies included.

And that image of life sciences being the dynamic force of the new Scottish economy takes a bit of a knock. Only 10 firms made it.

Selling knowledge

And here's perhaps the most significant part: what, if anything, marks them out?

Learning from that would seem to be the place that the high-growth sector can be grown.

The study discerns three themes.

One, they're knowledge-intensive and look for innovative advantage and, two, they identify their workforce as a key source of competitiveness.

Those two attributes link to three: they do business by selling knowledge at least as much as stuff, and by building relationships with customers rather than seeking one-off transactions.

That can include jointly developing solutions to partners' challenges either with that customer or with other such firms.

There's a bit of a contradiction here.

The diversity of Scotland's high-growth firms tells us they can be hard to spot, but once you spot them, you find they have some common characteristics.

Those are characteristics that might be harnessed by others with high-growth potential, as much as by government agency.

And for the government agencies, there's the advice from this study to look beyond high tech, to build relationships, and to be more flexible in their support than they've typically been.

So... time to refresh that business plan?