Open innovation: A literature review and recommendations for family business research

Introduction: By exchanging core organizational resources with their environment and renewing social interactions within and outside the family, family rms are able to build and sustain competitive advantage over many generations (Arrègle et al. 2007; Salvato and Melin 2008). Nevertheless, how the relational resources and capabilities of family rms can facilitate their innovation performance has not received much attention in our eld (De Massis, Frattini, and Lichtenthaler 2013). In line with Duran et al. (2015) we believe that the opportunities residing within the networks of family rms may help explain why family businesses achieve similar or even higher innovation output compared to nonfamily rms, despite their structurally lower investments in innovation (Carney et al. 2015). We propose that valuable new insights can be obtained by applying concepts from the open innovation literature (e.g., Chesbrough 2003; Dahlander and Gann 2010) to the empirical context of family rms. As family ownership is more prevalent and more likely to aect goal setting and rm behavior among smaller, mostly private businesses than in large public corporations (Carney et al. 2015), a thorough review of open innovation in the context of small-and medium-sized enterprises (hereafter SMEs) is executed. Supplemented with the knowledge so far developed by the few family rm specic open innovation studies, this review should provide a solid base for future research on open innovation in family rms.