Advancing research on creativity in family firms

Abstract

To survive, firms need to be able to regenerate/renew themselves: creativity is key to firms’ enduring competitiveness (Gong et al., 2009). This is of particular importance for family businesses, where transgenerational continuity is at the core of family owners’ preoccupations, leading to family firms’ long-term orientation (e.g. Le Breton Miller and Miller, 2006). Research has well established the link between firms’ performance and creativity (Gong et al., 2009), as creativity – defined as the production, by an individual or a collective, of new and useful ideas (Amabile, 1988) – is key in developing new methods or products (Hauser et al., 2006) that enable the firm to renew itself. For this reason, exploring creativity should be included in family business scholars’ agenda in the upcoming years. Indeed, while innovation in family business is well documented (Calabro et al., 2019), creativity has received little attention in family business research. This chapter identifies the possible paths for creativity in family businesses: Do family businesses represent organizational contexts likely to encourage creativity?