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Family firms are the prevalent form of entrepreneurial organizations worldwide. While even long-lasting and successful family firms are said to invest less in innovation, their innovation output varies according to their heterogeneity often matching or even exceeding the output of other incumbent firms. These contradictory results have confused entrepreneurship and innovation researchers alike. Based on an integrative literature review we develop a conceptual framework to explain the role of family firm specific resources for innovation. Our analysis of 48 peer-reviewed empirical articles drawn from a body of 466 published empirical papers shows how our integrative perspective helps to solve these existing contradictions. We argue that higher investments into these family firm specific resources trigger a virtuous circle in family firm innovation.

In one of the most influential studies on family firm internationalization, Sciascia et al. (2012) advance a curvilinear relationship between family ownership and firm internationalization. We replicate their study adopting a three-step approach. First, we use the same measures on a different sample to test the generalizability of their findings. Second, we change the independent variable and hypothesize a negative relationship between family involvement in the board of directors and firm internationalization. Third, we introduce and measure the moderating role of firm age and firm size in this relationship. Our study advances the family firm internationalization literature both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, we show that it is not so much family ownership per se, but the influence the family obtains through board directorship that affects the family firm internationalization strategy. In addition, we show that this effect is moderated by firm age and size. Methodologically, our study is an important step forward toward increasingly transparent and replicable family business research.

Recently, studies have highlighted the importance of a holistic digitalisation that incorporates process digitalisation, product digitalisation as well as digital transformation involving redefinitions of business models and organisational identities. Whereas previous studies either aimed for generalisability across firms, or investigated digital transformation projects in particular industries, only very few studies investigated the particularities of family businesses (i.e., family influence) in the digitalisation context. Based on a unique dataset of 164 German family firms, our study sheds light on the role of family ability and family willingness for holistic digitalisation. Our results show that product digitalisation is statistically independent from family influence. Whereas process digitalisation benefits only from family ability, digital tranformation is bound to the families’ willingness to pursue the transformation.

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