Project R-12206

Transgenerational knowledge creation and learning in entrepreneurial business families. (Research)

Entrepreneurial business families are families that "have founded and continue to control at least one established and successful family business, plan to continue to have family members involved in business venturing, and regard the management of long-term family wealth rather than of any one business as the focal objective" (Le Breton-Miller & Miller, 2018, p. 528). A number of researchers agree that there is a need for scholars to shift attention to the family-level and its influence on entrepreneurship (Aldrich and Cliff, 2003; Chang et al., 2009; Foss et al., 2008). Recent studies (e.g. Löhde et al., 2020) have tried to answer this call by using the entrepreneurial business family as a distinct level of analysis in order to investigate their learning capabilities, as learning and knowledge creation within the business family is crucial to remain entrepreneurial and competitive in the long term. Although some scholars have attempted to investigate entrepreneurial learning in a family firm context, we know virtually nothing about how entrepreneurial learning occurs within a specific entrepreneurial business family. This Ph.D. aims to fill this gap by combining insights from different research streams while also collecting qualitative and quantitative data from entrepreneurial business families.

01 September 2021 - 29 April 2022