The entry discusses the business exit in the context of family firms. Business exit is as important as business entry, but it has received much less attention in management and entrepreneurship in general and family business context in particular. Exiting a business in family firms poses more significant challenges for the owners’ managers because emotional attachment is at the core of family firms. The entry highlights; why exit is vital in family firms, how it happens at different levels, the modes of exit, and the challenges for family owners.

This dissertation examines how family business portfolios endure across time and investigates the entrepreneurial strategies that they engage in. The goal of this dissertation is addressed through five appended papers in which I have argued for the importance of business families owning multiple firms, that is, portfolio entrepreneurship. Portfolio entrepreneurship plays a central role in economic development as it is a prevalent phenomenon in developed and emerging economies. However, despite its importance, there is currently very little research on portfolio entrepreneurship, especially in the context of family firms.

In so doing, I study nine business families owning multiple businesses in Pakistan. I conducted in-depth interviews with family owners and employees; the interviews were supplemented with other sources of data such as observations and archival material. When studying questions such as how a portfolio is built-up across generations, how and why business families exit and, when they exit, which businesses they choose to exit from, I draw on insights from the literature on portfolio entrepreneurship, business exit, family firms, socioemotional wealth, sensemaking, compassion and social identity theory in the five papers.

The dissertation addresses the calls for studies on portfolio entrepreneurship in the context of family firms by examining the process through which a portfolio is constructed by studying performance and exit related issues. In other words, it examines both the growth and the contraction of portfolios. The study offers several contributions. First, it contributes to studies on enduring entrepreneurship by investigating how business families last across time despite encountering difficult situations and declining business. Second, the study contributes to the portfolio entrepreneurship literature by elucidating how portfolios are built across generations and the roles of both growth and contractions while addressing processual and contextual issues.

Third, the study contributes to the business exit literature by looking at the exit process in a family business context and exploring multiple exits. This isunique, as it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first study on business exits looking at multiple exit in the context of family firms. Fourth, the study also contributes to the literature on family firms by exploring how and why business families refrain from exiting from their core legacy business and how their emotions influence the exit process.

Finally, the study contributes to context-related issues. The study adds to the literature on contextualization and addresses the call for more context-specific studies in entrepreneurship scholarship. This dissertation is focused on context-based factors considering the spatial and social context, where the former has been undertaken by taking an emerging economy and country context as the setting, while the latter refers to the relational and emotional ties within family firms. In addition to its theoretical contributions, this dissertation has important implications for practice. The dissertation brings to the fore some promising and unique ways in which entrepreneurship endures across time and context through the transgenerational transmission of entrepreneurship and insights into how business families behave in a declining business situation. Additionally, this study offers insights for family owners and managers on how to address the dilemma of continued entrepreneurship, that is, how to encourage and foster enduring entrepreneurship in organizations, in particular in the context of family firms.

The purpose of this chapter is to review and synthesise the prior work on kinship in family firms and to open up future research avenues for this interesting and important topic. The study shows that kinship is highly relevant in family firms by revisiting the concept of family and kinship as well as the definition of family firms. This chapter explores important aspects related to family firms, such as continuity of generations, succession, inheritance and resource provision and links these to kinship. These aspects are identified as four functions of kinship and indicate the possible research gaps, thereby suggesting future kinship research avenues.

Portfolio entrepreneurship is a critical but relatively unexplored aspect of entrepreneurship literature. In particular, little research exists on portfolio entrepreneurship in the context of family firms. Existing literature on portfolio entrepreneurship in the context of family firms tends to have multiple research gaps which are unaddressed. To this end, we explore the extant literature on portfolio entrepreneurship in general and portfolio entrepreneurship in the context of family firms in particular and bring forth three future research areas. First, we examine how triggers and motivations to indulge in portfolio entrepreneurship are relevant and important for family firms. Second, we explore the role of different settings for the exploration of the portfolio family firms. Third, we argue that performance and outcome results are important aspects to have a closer look at the growth and survival of portfolio family firms.

What series of activities do entrepreneurs engage in that lead to a compassionate organization? And What role does spirituality have for the activities of compassion? Drawing on spirituality and compassion as a conceptual lenses and a single case study from Pakistan, we find that through activities of compassion, grounded in the spiritual beliefs, owner entrepreneurs can develop a sustainable organization. Besides, we identify a set of activities and build an activity model of a sustainable organization. This study contributes to the literature on compassion, spirituality, and sustainable entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurial exit is an integral component of the entrepreneurial process. Yet entrepreneurs often fail to realize the gains from their harvesting activities (Dehlen et al., 2012). This study extends our understanding of entrepreneurial recycling which allows a firm to re-allocate and re-invest the harvested resources (Mason & Harrison, 2006). Although entrepreneurial recycling is viewed as an important element of the post exit process (DeTienne & Chirico, 2013), with few exceptions there is little research present on this phenomenon. This is especially interesting in the case of a special breed of entrepreneurs called portfolio entrepreneurs (DeTienne, 2010; Rosa, 1998) who own multiple businesses simultaneously and undertake multiple exits as compare to entrepreneurs who start and harvest a single venture only (MacMillan, 1986). Theoretical and empirical research suggests that the context of family firms has a profound impact on portfolio entrepreneurship as well as on entrepreneurial recycling strategies (Carter & Ram, 2003).

The present study investigates exit patterns in family business portfolios in times of declining performance. Drawing on social identity theory and a sample of six family business portfolios from Pakistan, we reveal that business families often prefer shutting down satellite portfolio firms rather than selling them. This is found to be mainly driven by the identity fit of the family and the satellite business and the desire to restart it at a later point in time. This study contributes to literature on portfolio entrepreneurship, business exit, and long-term success and endurance of family firms.

Family business groups (FBGs) are a fascinating phenomenon. They exist everywhere under different names and guises (Parada et al., Academia Revista Latinoamericana De Administración 20:19-30, 2016; Tu et al., Business Horizons 45:39-46, 2002). Their emergence and development showcase the dynamics of families in business and the decisions they proactively, or reactively, take to business opportunities or institutional and contextual challenges. More recent accounts underscore that we are just beginning to understand how they grow, develop, and perform over time (Rosa, P., Rautiainen, M., Pihkala, T., Parada, M. J., and Discua Cruz, A. (2019). Conclusions: Researching family business groups: Lessons learned and avenues for further research. In The family business group phenomenon (pp. 387-395). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.).

The main interest of this book has dealt with the inherent strengths of FBGs, widening our understanding of their sustainability, competitiveness, and development. This book highlights that research conducted on the internal dynamics of FBGs is sparse. The phenomenon has remained severely understudied around the world.

Exit is a vital element of the entrepreneurial process. It becomes explicitly more multifaceted in family business portfolios due to the complex nature of the business portfolios. Research on family business portfolios has explored the role of resources. However, there is a dearth of studies on how family business portfolios manage resources through exited businesses. Drawing on the case study research approach and following cases from Pakistan, our study led us to report three key insights: (1) Family owners re-direct the resources back to the business portfolio while exiting subsequent businesses to restructure their overall portfolio; (2) They manage resources to provide the next generation with the opportunity to start businesses that follow their passion and renew the business portfolio with a new set of ideas; (3) They manage resources through recycling of the family business portfolios in times of crisis, enabling the business to withstand critical times.

We explore the process of entrepreneurial exit in a sample of five family firm portfolios from Pakistan. Our aim is to understand how entrepreneurial exit occurs in family firm portfolios and why family firm owners exit from some satellites and not from others. The emergent insights of this study through observing total number of 25 exits, portrays that due to emotional depth family firm owners manifest a strong attachment toward their core business and refrain from exiting from it. This tendency persists across generations. By doing so, family firm owners tend to exit from satellites, regardless to the fact that they are successful or not, to save the core business. Furthermore, they are more likely to exit from satellites ventured with external parties, not directly managed by the family and/or founded by distant relatives.

How does a business family manage its business portfolio in times of declining performance to sustain the portfolio's long-term endurance? Drawing on social identity theory and six family business portfolios from Pakistan, we find that business families may prefer to shut down a satellite business rather than sell it, which is primarily driven by identity considerations. In addition, the family's goal to recycle the assets, the aim to restart the business later, and the increasing decline in performance are important contingency factors. This study contributes to the literature on portfolio entrepreneurship, business exit, and the enduring entrepreneurship of family firms.

The overarching intent of this manuscript is to heighten awareness to the concept of commitment escalation as it bears on a failing family business. Specifically, drawing on the concept of emotional ownership, together with self-justification arguments, we a) identify factors considered to be most forceful in contributing to the presence of commitment escalation and thus, resistance to change in a failing family business (i.e., emotional ownership, feeling of responsibility, investment of capital, temporal distance from the founder’s business, individualism/collectivism), and b) model these related factors in a form that can serve heuristically to stimulate future empirical research capable of testing for the construct validity of commitment escalation in a family business context. We present potential items that may be useful for future scholars in measuring our constructs of interest as they relate to a failing family business.

Drawing on identity theories and entrepreneurial identity, we examine how multiple identities relate and change across generation in the pursuit of portfolio entrepreneurship in the family business context. Using an inductive, qualitative approach based on multiple case study design of 12 farming business families, we discover that next generation family members engage in new business creation to build a positive work identity, that is to experience multiple identities as compatible with one another. We develop a process model that contribute towards our understanding of how next generation family members organize their multiple identities, which results in identity change over generations. A positive relationship between multiple identities leads moreover to beneficial outcomes such as positive emotions and finding meaningfulness in work. Our findings have implications for the literature on entrepreneurial identity, portfolio entrepreneurship and family business.

Principal Topic

Incubators at their best of abilities embrace the practices to not only foster the entrepreneurial initiatives, but also influence the activities and outcomes of the incubated entrepreneurs (Apa et al., 2017). Nevertheless, the support function of coaching is not always appropriate, especially when it comes to guiding and helping the incubated entrepreneurs to successfully overcome the adversities. In a typical incubator setting, novice entrepreneurs go through phases of doubt that make them reluctant to continue the entrepreneurial adventure. Yet, despite the importance of the role of coaching as the support function of the incubators, there is a dearth of studies on the coaching practices that incubators adopt and their influence on the incubated entrepreneurs. This research aims at questioning the coaching practices of business incubators. Specifically, we ask: 1) how the coaching practices of the incubators impact the attitudes of novice entrepreneurs to live up to the expectations of the success of the start-ups and; 2) why some novice entrepreneurs are more likely to be successful than others under the coaching practices of the incubators.

Method

Our research design is a longitudinal multiple case study reflexive approach. The research setting is entrepreneurial incubated start-ups at a business school in France. We followed project leaders of 62 start-ups, over a 5-year period (October 2012 – April 2017) of observations. We purposefully sampled cases of incubated start-ups, from which we have extreme cases of 10 successful ventures and 10 failed ventures, we labelled these cases as ‘winners’ and “losers”.

Findings and Implications

Multiple insights emerge from the study. First, we observed that the incubated novice entrepreneurs adopt both causal and effectual behaviors. Our data showed that the so-called incubated entrepreneurs labelled as ‘winners’ provided concrete illustrations of the difficulties experienced under this implacable logic of control, further improvising to embark on the logic of emancipation. Meanwhile the incubated entrepreneur labelled as ‘losers’ suggested that the control should be put ‘in good hands’ and ‘to good use’. It calls for a genuine change – we call it emancipation - in the way the coaches are accompanying the entrepreneurs throughout the development of their own ventures.

Although scholars have recognized the importance of innovation in family firms, the literature on family firm innovation tends to generally depict family firms as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for innovation, or focus on the factors with the potential to positively stimulate family firm innovation. Drawing on path dependence theory, this study focuses specifically on what family-specific barriers work against innovation in family firms. To that end, we follow a qualitative theory-building approach due to the limited amount of extant theory, and study a sample of four family businesses headquartered in Spain and Uruguay. The related propositions and theoretical contributions emerging from our study are shared in the concluding section.

We study the temporal evolution of innovation management in a family business group. In so doing, we highlight how family business owners adopt new ways to manage innovation in their business groups. We draw on a case of a family business group from Finland and address the question how the family business owners change their innovation management practices along with the development of the family business group. Our study adds to the temporal management of innovation in family firms, especially innovation in family businesses, by introducing the innovation management framework for analyzing the owners’ innovation activities.

Family business groups (FBGs) are ubiquitous, influential, and play a major role in national economies. While much of the current research around this topic has so far focused on emerging economies, more knowledge is needed on family business groups in developed economies; specifically, how they innovate, strategize, govern, and grow. Offering a comprehensive and global perspective on family business groups, this Handbook comprises international contributions from leading experts. Split into five sections, it covers strategy and business transformation; innovation strategies; management and governance; and new avenues for research on FBGs including the issues of sustainability and cultural alignment. An important resource for students and researchers of family business, strategy and management, this Handbook signals the emergence of the family business group phenomenon and solidifies research in this evolving area of study.

The management of family business groups is extremely complex. Internal complexity, which is a cause for failure of organizations, has been under explored. We study how family business groups manage their internal complexity to be able to survive over time. In this study, we bring together the case study method and complexity science to suggest new ways to study family business groups. We focus on a Finnish family business group and provide an empirical illustration, based on a large family business case, of how structural and cognitive complexity is dealt with.