Massimo Baù

Is the Family an ‘Asset’ or ‘Liability’ for Firm Performance? The Moderating Role of Environmental Dynamism

By integrating the stewardship and agency perspectives, our study extends the understanding of the dynamics that regulate the family as either an asset or liability for the firm. Our results show that the percentage of family members on the top management team (TMT) has an inverted U‐shaped relationship with firm performance. However, when environmental dynamism is low, this curvilinear relationship becomes steeper. When environmental dynamism is high, an increased percentage of family members on the TMT enhances firm performance.

Succession in Family Firms

The process of succession in family firms is often both lengthy and complex, and is influenced by factors such as the personal goals of the owner-manager, family structure, ability and ambitions of ...

Fail but Try Again? The Effects of Age, Gender, and Multiple‐Owner Experience on Failed Entrepreneurs' Reentry

We investigate what leads failed entrepreneurs to reenter entrepreneurship by taking a developmental career perspective. Specifically, we hypothesize that the age of failed entrepreneurs has a nonlinear relationship with the likelihood of reentering entrepreneurship that follows different career stages (early, middle, and late). The gender of failed entrepreneurs and multiple–owner experience in the failed firm are hypothesized to be moderators of this relationship. We test our hypotheses using a database consisting of the Swedish population, including 4,761 entrepreneurs who failed between 2000 and 2004. Analyzing their career paths over the years following their failure offers support for our theoretical expectations.

Roots to Grow: Family Firms and Local Embeddedness in Rural and Urban Contexts

The present study analyzes the nexus among business growth, ownership structure, and local embeddedness—that is, the involvement of economic actors in a geographically bound social structure—in rural and urban contexts. This work combines regional economics with studies on family business and firm growth and uses a coarsened matched sample of privately held Swedish firms. The findings indicate that family firms benefit more than nonfamily firms from local embeddedness and as such they achieve higher levels of growth and that this effect is more pronounced in rural areas. Research implications are shared in the Conclusion section.

Locality and internationalization of family firms

aCentre for Family Enterprise and ownership, Jönköping international Business school, Jönköping university, Jönköping, sweden; bDepartment of management, universität trier, trier, germany; cDepartment of applied Economics, Erasmus school of Economics, Erasmus university, rotterdam, the netherlands; dDepartment of Entrepreneurship strategy and innovation, lancaster university management school, lancaster university, lancaster, uK

The role of researchers’ motivations in the genesis of academic spin-off companies

Spin-off companies play a key role in the mechanisms that universities enact to extract the industrial and commercial potential of the outcomes of scientific knowledge (Rothaermel et al., 2007). Ventures founded by scientists to exploit their discoveries and inventions are a powerful driver of innovation and economic growth, and represent a source of industrial change (Shane, 2004). For these reasons, science policy includes technology transfer among the “missions” of scientific profession, together with research and teaching (Etzkowitz, 2003).The activation of entrepreneurial process in academia is contingent on the interplay of factors at three distinct levels (Grimaldi et al., 2011): national and regional system of innovation, university strategy, and individual determinants. The literature has focused mainly on the first two dimensions, while the amount of attention given to the drivers for individual determinants is more scarce and recent (for example Colyvas and Powell, 2007; Jain et al., 2009; Clarysse et al., 2011).

Individual and Institutional Drivers of Technology Transfer in Open Innovation

The open innovation perspective offers a powerful framework which can be used in developing an understanding of the relationships that are established between academia and industry in the process of technology transfer. This paper develops a fourfold classification of technology transfer activities based on consultancy and the protection of intellectual property rights, and identifies the factors characterizing each activity. An empirical study was conducted with a sample of 249 researchers affiliated to Italian universities and the results indicate that specific forms of technology transfer are associated with particular configurations of regional systems of innovation, academic organizations and the motivations of researchers. The authors find that exchanges of tacit knowledge benefit from social interaction, while those based on codified knowledge are less context-dependent. In addition, more complex forms of technology transfer – those combining tacit and codified knowledge – require a broader endowment of resources, at both individual and contextual levels.