Purpose The purpose of this study is threefold: first, to provide a comprehensive and systemized literature review on open innovation (OI) in family firms; second, to identify the antecedent of family firms’ heterogeneity (i.e. governance structure, goals and resources) and to outline how they affect OI behavior; and third, to propose potential avenues for further research. Design/methodology/approach The study consists of a systematic literature review and analyses the findings of 36 papers on OI and family firms. Findings Based on the results of the reviewed papers, authors show how family firms’ specific characteristics/factors strictly related to their governance structure, goals and resources affect OI behavior. Furthermore, the authors highlight also that adoption of different mechanisms/strategies can be useful to family firms to overcome OI barriers. Finally, discussion and avenues for further research are presented. Practical implications This review can be useful to family business managers, directors and/or external consultants to better understand family-specific characteristics to support family businesses in opening up their boundaries to external partners. Originality/value To the best knowledge, this is the first systematic review on OI and family firms that attempt to identify all family-specific characteristics/factors, known as the antecedent of heterogeneity that affects family firm OI behavior. The authors believe that it could represent an important guide for future research on this topic.

Although there is an increased interest in studies on FFs and open innovation (OI) the existing knowledge is rather limited. This study explores the open innovation choices, their determinants and the relative innovation performance in FFs with respect to non-family firms. By means of an European survey involving Italian, Swedish, Finnish and UK family and non-family firms we aim at investigating whether FFs are adopting a peculiar behaviour in the open innovation era. In order to achieve this goal, we rely on concepts and constructs already defined by open innovation literature and we explore the behaviour of FFs and non-family firms. Analysis of differences show that family firms are in general less open than non-family firms, when we consider openness in terms of breadth, while they show a higher intensity of collaboration behaviour when we consider the measures of depth. FFs perceive as slightly higher the competitive pressure, but very similar is the perceived technological pressure. Also drivers of collaboration and innovation strategy are on average very similar. Significant differences between FFs and non-FFs are found as concerns the use of IP legal rights (lower for FFs). On average, FFs declare a slightly higher novelty performance. A first type of regressions shows the contribution of some environmental and internal firm-specific factors as explanatory variables of openness degree and thus allow to depict the specific profile of FFs. When we explore differences on the supposed mediating factors of the relationship between openness and innovation performance, the organizational-managerial mechanisms emerge as factors over which FFs exert particular care. A second type of regressions shows that, beside the external social capital, organizational-managerial mechanisms emerge for FFs as a relevant mediator in the relationships between OI depth and innovation performance.

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PurposeThe present paper aims at exploring effective business model adaptations in response to unexpected events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe authors test the effect of two major business model adaptations, namely changes in the value proposition and changes in the target market, on a sample of 96 family SMEs.FindingsResults show that only changes in the value proposition had a positive and significant impact on performance, helping family SMEs to better confront COVID-19. However, this effect is reduced in the case of target market change.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how business model adaptations in family SMEs affect performance in crisis situations.

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