دانلود رایگان مقاله تمایل به حق ثبت اختراع توسط شرکت های خانوادگی

Abstract

This paper provides new evidence of innovation processes in family firms by investigating their attitude toward the protection of innovation outputs. More specifically, the main objective is to understand, through the SEW (Socioemotional Wealth) lens, whether innovative family firms tend to use patents as a tool for protecting intellectual property. Based on a sample of 229 Italian companies that make R&D investments, our analysis highlights that degree of alignment with the family business model is a significant predictor of a firm’s attitude toward protecting innovation with patents, even though not all of the dimensions of a family business have the same effect. When disentangling the effect of three different indicators (i.e., family ownership, family governance and the presence of young successors), family involvement in the board of directors is a negative significant driver, the presence of young successors is a positive driver, and ownership has no effect.

5. Concluding remarks

This paper’s empirical analysis provides interesting results. First, our assumption that family presence in the firm’s operation influences the management of technological innovation is confirmed. In particular, the family firm model is an explanatory variable for the propensity to use patents as an intellectualproperty protection tool. Even if it is widely acknowledged that family ownership and family involvement affect the management of innovation, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate whether differences among firms’ propensity to patent can be ascribed to family firms’ influence. Second, because of the various degrees of alignment with the family firm model among the sampled firms, a disaggregated analysis of the impact of multiple family firm dimensions has great explanatory power because the family firm dimensions have a different impact. Indeed, family firms cannot be simplistically viewed as uniform entities. The failure to recognize the existence of different types of family firms that do not fit the stereotypical family firm profile proposed by Zahra (2003) can result in inappropriate academic outcomes, encouraging practitioners to provide inappropriate assistance to categories of family firms that do not fit the profile (Bannò et al., 2016). This is an interesting contribution because empirical investigations on family firms have typically distinguished between family and nonfamily firms without further differentiating the former category and treating it as a homogeneous group. This might have been the primary reason for the discrepancies in the empirical results that characterize family firms’ management innovation. We believe that this classification is our paper’s first strength. More specifically, when analyzing the propensity to patent, we disentangle the effect of three indicators: (1) ownership has no impact; (2) the involvement of family members in the board of directors is a negative significant driver; and (3) the presence of young successors is a positive driver. In contrast with our expectations that ownership composition would affect the attitude towards propensity to patent, our results show that only the family governance structure has a significant and negative effect. As already stated by Block et al. (2013) most prior research neglects this distinction, while they show is an important one as the family firms effect in terms of technological importance of innovations is mainly driven by family management rather than by family ownership. This finding suggests that the ownership composition of family firms can reflect the need for representativeness instead of the actual distribution of decisional power in terms of managing innovation. Given these results and through the lens of SEW, we confirm that innovative family firms make strategic and managerial decisions that differ from nonfamily firms because such choices cannot be enlightened through traditional economic logic. More specifically, in accordance with the SEW conceptual framework, family governance of a firm imposes both risk aversion and a parsimonious attitude that discourages the use of an expensive intellectual-property protection tool such as the patent. This attitude is coherent with the natural unwillingness to disclose information in favour of keeping an innovative idea secret and choosing notto benefit from patent protection. The presence of a successor in the family is a positive determinant of the propensity to patent. This result implies that the participation of at least one younger family member on the board can be a source of openminded initiatives, new information, knowledge and resources. Therefore, a young family member should promote investments in innovation and the use of patents by encouraging risk taking and overcoming the traditional conservatism of family firms (D’allura, 2015). Coherent with most studies on heterogeneity, this result confirms that diversity induced by the presence of a young family member enhances the creative problem-solving process because of the variety of ideas generated by that family member. This result is also consistent with family business researchers, who note that when multiple generations are involved in firm management, the organization has greater innovative output and better management of innovation (Salvato, 2004).