Management Accounting and Entrepreneurship in a New Economy Firm : Litium-A single case study

Abstract: The importance of entrepreneurship has been widely acknowledged by many scholars, however, there is an argument that entrepreneurship tends to pose a unique dilemma with management accounting – a part of management control in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to find a solution for the apparent conflict between management accounting and entrepreneurship through a single case study of Litium – a new economy firm operating in information technology industry. The study of Litium reveals that a simple and solid management accounting is an effective way in order to keep management accounting in harmony with entrepreneurial spirit. This finding goes in line with the suggestion of loosely coupled management control in new economy firms by Lukka and Granlund (2003). The paper reviews various relevant literatures so as to build a collected framework about management accounting in new economy firms. The framework then provides a guideline for empirical findings and analysis part. We acknowledged that the studies of Lukka and Granlund (2003), Granlund and Taipaleenmaki (2005), Lovstal (2001) and Morris, Allen, Schindehutte, and Avila (2006) are very useful for studying management accounting in new economy firms where entrepreneurship is highly emphasized. In addition, life-cycle perspective is also valuable to understand thoroughly the practice of management accounting in new economy firms. In accordance with the topic and the purpose of our case study, we recognized that qualitative research method is most suitable. Moreover, the interview – one type of qualitative methods – was chosen as a main tool for colleting data in our study since it can provide the authors with important insights into a situation and use-ful shortcuts to the prior history of the situation