Business Plans: Who wants them, who uses them?

Every year about 10 million business plans are written world wide. About 10,000 business plans are produced in Sweden each year. Overviews of the research literature on planning and performance show that the relationship between plans and performance is assumed rather than empirically proven. Why does not writing business plans improve performance? Why do millions of companies do it? This study investigates how business plans are dealt with in six new ventures. It applies an institutional perspective as base for its analysis. Schooling and the provision of easily used templates is important to explain why business plans were written. Once written, they are rarely updated or followed offering also an explanation as to why plans do not influence performance. In other words, they are written because they are expected to write them, and there are no clear performance effects as they do not follow the plans.

Autorentext

Dr. Tomas Karlsson received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from Jönköping International business School (JIBS) in 2005. He has served as post doc at Wilfrid Laurier University 2005-2006, Queensland University of Technology 2007, and JIBS 2008. He is currently Associate Professor at Lund University.