Collaborative innovation in family firms: Past research, current debates and agenda for future research

Abstract

Collaborative innovation can boost family firms’ innovation performance by enabling them to tackle their resource constrains and tap into knowledge, financial capital, technology, and information from other organizations. Unfortunately, existing research on collaborative innovation in family firms is still in its infancy. We systematically review and organize fragmented findings and arguments from prior research along three perspectives: strategic, transactional, and relational. In doing so, we provide a summary of the current state-of-the-art in this literature, point to the importance of collaborative innovation to resolve the innovation dilemma in family firms and identify promising opportunities for future research.