Introduction to corporate entrepreneurship in family firms: overview and current issues

Abstract

The question of what is different about entrepreneurship in family businesses and how they can be entrepreneurial has occupied researchers and practitioners for quite a while now. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to introduce the reader to the concept of CE in family firms, and illustrate the current state of research on how family firms manage to pursue CE activities. We show that family businesses are very heterogeneous and that the phenomenon of CE in family businesses is very multi-faceted and complex. It follows that there can be no universal answer to this question. Rather, family business research must evolve in a direction that allows for a much more sophisticated analysis of CE in this specific context. To achieve this goal, we have identified the three most important research gaps in the field and some promising questions to determine the direction in which the field is moving.