NCA used for theory formulation in a PhD dissertation

In a PhD dissertation of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, entitled “The growth of high-tech companies: theoretical framework and empirical research”, Ivan Župić (photo) used NCA to formulate “barriers to growth” as necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions that prevent the outcome (growth) to exist. Necessary conditions (necessary causes) can be formulated in two ways:

• The presence of the condition is necessary for the presence of the outcome (enabler)
• The absence of the condition is sufficient for the absence of the outcome (bottleneck)