Toward a Typology of Family Firm Corporate Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Family involvement in business creates idiosyncrasies in firm behavior that promote long‐term, often transgenerational, strategic logics that ostensibly align with the motivations and outcomes of corporate entrepreneurship. Interestingly, extant research provides only minimal insight into the heterogeneous nature of corporate entrepreneurship orientations pursued by family firms. To better understand this heterogeneity, we develop a typology of corporate entrepreneurship in family firms providing a reconciliatory approach to this literary diversity and suggest that the varied corporate entrepreneurship orientations of family firms are impacted by the duality of a family's distinct intention to pursue transgenerational succession and capabilities to acquire external knowledge.

Notes

1. While succession intentions and knowledge acquisition capabilities are undoubtedly not discrete variables, following the typological approach taken in the present research each is discussed as archetypical ends of a continuum.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Van Randolph

Robert Van de Graaff Randolph is Assistant Professor in the Department of Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Zonghui Li

Zonghui Li is Assistant Professor in the Management Department of Management, Davis College of Business at Jacksonville University.

Joshua J. Daspit

Joshua J. Daspit is Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Information Systems at the Mississippi State University.