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 bridge arguments within the family business literature to develop a typology of corporate entrepreneurship in family firms. Our findings provide 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 the firm's unique capabilities to acquire external knowledge—calling into question the antecedents, modes, and outcomes underlying the strategic impetus of family firms to engage in corporate entrepreneurship.