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Innovation in family business

Published on January 18, 2015   46 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello. I am Alfredo De Massis. I am Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Business at Lancaster University Management School, where I am also the director of the school's Centre for Family Business. During my career, I have been teaching about family business and innovation at undergraduate, master, and doctoral levels at Lancaster and elsewhere. I also teach in executive education programs, and serve as a scientific director in executive programs about innovation in family business. And I also do consulting to family business. So today, I will be talking to you about family business and innovation.
0:42
Before we get started, I would like to review today's agenda. Well, as you will see, it's made of five parts. First, I will start with an introduction to innovation in family business and showing to you what we currently know. Then I will provide some hints about family governance and its effects on innovation. Then I will discuss the findings from some of my published studies on innovation in family business. And finally, I will show how family businesses offer an extraordinary place to leverage their tradition in order to innovate, and I will draw some conclusions.
1:25
So let's start with an introduction to innovation, and with an overview of what we know about innovation in family business.
1:36
Technological innovation can be defined as the set of activities through which a firm conceives, designs, manufactures, and introduces a new product, technology, system, and technique. This is a quite old definition provided by Freeman in 1976. But this definition is broad enough to include different types of innovation, because you can easily imagine that here you have product innovation, process innovation, et cetera.