Marina Letonja *
Proposition 3: Previous working experiences outside a SFF and access to expert know how through external training programs are positively related to innovativeness of
successors in SFF.
5
Conclusions
Combination of different methods is a usual way of transferring knowledge to the generation of successors in SFF. Founders in our research believe that it is very good to let successors observe them at work, get involved in daily operations, into business meetings and negotiations with partners and to let them find solutions by themselves, to learn by problem solving, and also take responsibility for desicions. Studying and getting academic knowledge in combination with early socialization, as well as work experience in other firms is important for the development of successors, of firm's products, services and processes.
In the recent five years founders and their successors report intensive and constant development of new or of improved products, product models, services and processes. Thus they maintain and improve SFF’s operations. This is a result of a strong and dynamic relationship between the parent/founder and successor, of a high level of confidence and successors' willingness to learn. Younger generation is sparkling with new ideas, which mostly result in introduction of improvements or new processes in a firm, many of them leading to rationalization of business processes.
We believe that our research findings contribute to broadening our understanding of family business succession from the knowledge transfer perspective as well as it opens some new research directions. The future research should address the ways of managing the early exposure of children to a business as a part of knowledge transfer process. It should address as well social networks, social capital. According to Steier (2001), innovation ability of firms is complemented by social capital, which is defined as a stock of resources and abilities in a network of relationships between firms and/or people. Social capital facilitates mobility of know-how and its sharing between firms and individuals. This contributes to promotion of innovation. It is extremely important that
SFF are well connected as this enables access to complementary resources of production, know-how. Another direction of future research can be corporate entrepreneurship, as innovativeness is connected with it. According to Kellermanns and Eddleston (2006) corporate entrepreneurship is of key importance for survival of SFF, their profitability and sustainable growth. The future research should address as well the question of founder’s management style. A too strong involvement of the founder into operative decisions and family issues can decrease his/her readiness for risk-taking, and risk taking is related to innovativeness of a SFF (Sethi et al., 2001). According to Szulanski (1996) there might be some obstacles that hinder knowledge transfer from founders to the next generation in SFF, which affect innovativeness of the next generation, and that are: random ambiguity and unproven correctness, founder not interested to transfer knowledge, successor not motivated to accept knowledge, factors of circumstances, like limitations in organizations and bad relationship between predecessor and successor. These obstacles and how they affect innovativeness of the next generation in SFF can be another direction of the future research.
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