Innovation in family and non-family businesses: a resource perspective

This article expands our understanding regarding the differences in innovative behaviour between family and non-family firms. To detect real rather than sample differences between independent family and non-family manufacturing companies in Spain, we use a matched sample methodology with data from the European Manufacturing Survey – a European cross-national survey launched in 11 countries and focused on the manufacturing sector. A Mann-Whitney U non-parametric test revealed that six out of seven measures were statistically significant between the two matched groups of companies. We found differences between family and non-family firms with regard to the role of human, social and marketing capital for innovation. These findings are of interest because some of them run contrary to conventional thinking that family firms are less innovative than non-family firms.