Innovation and Family Firms: Past and Future Research Perspectives

Introduction

In today’s environment of globalization and rapid technological change, innovation is critical for the continued growth and vitality of organizations and economies (Garud, Tuertscher, & Van de Ven, 2013). The need to be innovative applies to firms of every size, sector, and ownership type, although not all firms exhibit the same innovative behavior in response to their challenges and problems (Serrano-Bedia, López-Fernández, & Garcia-Piqueres, 2016). Additionally, as it constitutes one of the fundamental components of Corporate Entrepreneurship (Sharma & Chrisman, 1999), innovation can contribute to the impulse of entrepreneurial attitudes conducive to the development of competitive strategies that favor the maintenance and creation of wealth in a sustained manner over time.

In particular, research on innovation management in family firms (FF) shows that these firms have peculiar features and different innovation behaviors based on their risk preferences, resource endowments, and family objectives (De Massis, Frattini, Kotlar, Petruzzelli, & Wright, 2016; Patel & Chrisman, 2014), which may create both advantages and disadvantages in specific dimensions of the innovation process (König, Kammerlander, & Enders, 2013; Lichtenthaler & Muethel, 2012).

The previous literature has highlighted the importance of FF for economies around the world adding significantly to both employment and wealth creation through their contribution to the gross domestic product -e.g., 65% of employment and GDP in Europe, and 60% of employment and 50% of GDP in the USA (Botero, Cruz, Massis, & Nordqvist, 2015; Memili, Fang, Chrisman, & De Massis, 2015). This justifies the increasing research interest in innovation in FF in recent years. Such interest is clearly demonstrated considering that during the period of 2012-2017, journal articles in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science databases containing family business as a topic exceed 4,000; in addition to the advancement experienced by specialized journals in FF, reaching impact rates in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) equivalent to those of the most prestigious journals in the fields of social sciences or business management (i.e., Family Business Review or the Journal of Family Business Strategy).

Such intense research development experienced in recent years makes it extremely difficult to have an up-to-date, systematic, and comprehensive view of the lines of research present in this field, as well as its current state of development. Consequently, a reflection on the accumulated knowledge is often needed to establish a consensus basis and advance the development of the field. On this regard, Williams and Plouffe (2007) emphasized analysis of knowledge development using a systematic literature review of an academic field as “a critical step in any discipline's growth and maturity” (p. 408). They further stated that a review of articles published in peer-reviewed journals is “one of the most useful and relevant approaches for evaluating a field’s accrued knowledge” (p. 408).

According to Formentini and Romano (2016), a literature review is a structured, explicit, and reproducible design for identifying, evaluating and interpreting the existing body of recorded documents. The main objectives are usually twofold: firstly, to summarize existing research by identifying similar patterns or lines of research; secondly, to support the identification of the conceptual content of the field. In a similar approach, the primary goal of this chapter is to perform a systematic review and content analysis of the most recent publications addressing innovation within the field of family business in journals indexed in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) databases. Therefore, the work described in this chapter makes two main contributions to previous literature. First, it provides a comprehensive and up-to-date review of what is known about innovation in family firms, allowing researchers to reflect on the current status of this field. Second, this review identifies research opportunities to help family firm scholars trace a path to further contribute to its development.