The role of family firm specific resources in innovation: an integrative literature review and framework

Abstract

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.

Innovative Business Strategies in the Face of COVID-19: An Approach to Open Innovation of SMEs in the Sonora Region of Mexico

“…Therefore, non-family businesses have a greater propensity and ease towards open innovation, which makes them look like companies that are more collaborative with the outside world and more open to capturing knowledge. These actions allow these types of companies to raise their innovative practices that impact financial performance [148]. These postulates are related to our findings from the multigroup analysis.…”

The speed of internationalization in regionally clustered family firms: a deeper understanding of innovation activities and cluster affiliation

“…Therefore, it is extremely important to ascertain whether that regression results are not biased by collinearity issues. Since all VIF values were below to the recommended threshold of 5 (Hair et al 2022; Table 7), we conclude that multicollinearity was not a problem. Then, the strength and significance of the path coefficients was examined through the bootstrapping as the basis for calculating t-values (Sarstedt et al 2014).…”

“…Following this guideline, we employed the BCa bootstrapping to correct the data for both bias and skewness (Aguirre-Urreta and Rönkkö 2018). 18 SmartPLS is a software with graphical interface for variance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) using the partial least squares (PLS) to estimate model parameters (Hair et al 2022). For more information on SmartPLS, please refer to: https://www.smartpls.com.…”

Ownership, governance, and internationalization in family firms: a replication and extension

“…Thus, family members are often bereft of the skills to ensure the firm's legitimacy, networks, and access to critical resources in foreign markets. As a result, the multiple perspectives that can increase the pool of knowledge and connections at the firm's disposal are absent (Heider et al, 2022;Sundaramurthy et al, 2014). In this sense, family directors may be at a disadvantage, as they often only have experience in their own organization and may therefore be fossilized and closed to new strategies appropriate in foreign markets.…”