What is External Partners

By taking insights from the Socioemotional Wealth theory, this chapter investigates the effect of family involvement in management on firms' innovative behavior, namely on their innovation effort. Furthermore, this research analyses whether firms are more willing to develop innovative efforts when they are engaged in technological collaborations with external partners, such as suppliers or customers. Authors used a panel dataset on 3,060 observations of Spanish manufacturing firms for the 2000–2012 period. The findings show a negative incidence of family managers on firms' innovative efforts. The empirical findings also reveal that technological collaborations with suppliers weaken the negative effect of family involvement in management on innovative effort.