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The purpose of this paper is to closely study young French small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The authors highlight the structure of these target firms and build a typology of corresponding business models.

The authors used a dataset of 38,000 young French SMEs. It is constituted of all individual and consolidated year‐end financial statements submitted by French firms to the commercial court. Data analysis techniques (principal component analysis then hierarchical and ascending classification) were used on the data.

The business models stemming from this typology are typical (to the greatest extent possible) and actionable. The authors are particularly interested in identifying groups of SMEs where government assistance would be particularly effective and strategically valuable for the national economy.

One of the authors' …