Family Firms and Innovation from Founder to Successor

Business process innovations in family firms: evidence from Serbia

Purpose

This paper aims to explore the innovation performance of Serbian family firms, the differences in the innovation performance between family and non-family firms as well as different family firms, and the relationship between business process innovation and customer satisfaction among family firms.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample consists of 207 valid responses from young Serbian companies from various industries founded in 2015 that published their financial statements in 2017. The statistical analysis involved descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, and correlation analysis.

Findings

The study results indicate that family businesses in Serbia are innovation-oriented and that they introduced a number of innovations in business processes related to the production and distribution of goods or services and the development of products and business processes. The results also suggest that family and non-family firms are equally committed to introducing innovations in business processes. In addition, the study did not confirm significant differences in the performance of business process innovations among family firms in the manufacturing, trade, and service sectors. Finally, the results demonstrate that introducing business process innovations is positively associated with customer satisfaction and customer retention rate in Serbian family firms.

Originality/value

This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of the innovation performance of Serbian family firms and can help policymakers assess the contribution of innovation to economic goals.

Are the Sins of the Father the Sins of the Sons, but Not the Daughters? Exploring How Leadership Gender and Generation Impact the Corporate Social Responsibility of Franchise Firms

Emerging literature suggests that male leaders guide their companies more towards operations-related (OR) Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and female leaders lead their companies more towards non-operation-related (Non-OR) CSR activities. Nevertheless, very little research has considered intergenerational issues in CSR practices. This study explores this question in a context unexplored to date, the franchise industry. We apply multivariate analysis to explore differences between franchisor leaders. Our results reveal that successor leaders engage their companies more in normative CSR than founding leaders. Contrary to our expectations, they also encourage more instrumental CSR activities compared to the founders. We found that female leaders promote normative CSR practices to a greater extent than their male counterparts. However, gender differences in instrumental CSR were only present for the group of current leaders, where men outperformed women. When we delved into the analyses by looking at the influence of the gender of the previous founder, we found that female heirs engage their companies at the same levels of instrumental CSR as their male heir counterparts. Implications for CSR practices in franchise firms and directions for future research are discussed.