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Corporate accelerators (CAs) have become increasingly popular in both research and practice. In the past, analyses of CAs have centered on organizations in general, but those analyses focused on the particularities of CAs rather than the firms’ contexts. With regard to firm-specific contexts, a growing number of family firms in Germany have started CAs in recent years. Family firms are known for their idiosyncrasies due to the family’s involvement, which is argued to affect cooperation between family firms and start-ups. We claim that CAs also differ in the context of family firms. Taking a family firm specific perspective on corporate entrepreneurship, we argue that the design of family firms’ CAs is influenced by these firms’ idiosyncrasies. By connecting this perspective with general CA design dimensions, we conceptually derive family firm specific CA designs and discuss their implications for CAs in general and for CAs in the context of family firms.
This cumulative dissertation includes three papers and one teaching case study. Together, they focus on topics highlighting the distinctiveness of family firms and new ventures. While the first paper analyzes the academic debate over the familiness concept in family firm research, the second paper focuses on explaining the unique relational dynamics between family and non-family managers in top management teams. The third paper aims to derive design designs for family firm specific corporate accelerators. The teaching case study shows how a growing new venture may strike a balance between coping with increasing organizational complexity and maintaining its distinct entrepreneurial spirit.
The trivago way
(2018)
Trivago is a leading travel meta-portal with EUR 754 million in revenue and a double-digit profit margin in 2016. Since its inception in 2004 and especially since 2009, the company's founders have realized impressive growth rates with revenue doubling nearly every year. As of 2016, the company had more than 1,200 employees and offered access to more than 1.3 million hotels in 190 countries. At the end of 2016, trivago carried out an IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange. For trivago's founders, the goal of not 'becoming corporate' had been a core premise for building the company. The task had been easy when trivago was still a small start-up, but its rapid growth made preserving the company's entrepreneurial capacity an increasingly challenging task: Would trivago be able to remain the entrepreneurial, driven company the founders had built and loved? The case targets MS, MA, and MBA students studying strategy, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, and innovation management. It is also appropriate for discussions in executive-education programs (eg, lectures focused on corporate transformation and drivers of change).
More than 15 years after the introduction of familiness into the literature, the term has evolved into one of the most popular concepts in family firm research. Despite the steadily growing body of studies that build on familiness, recent calls suggest a need to revisit its conceptualization due to a lack of a common understanding that could affect future research endeavours. In our systematic literature review of 25 studies, we find support for this notion and show that the discussion on the concept has reached a dead end. We present a systematization of familiness research that highlights an inconsistent conceptualization, a lack of validation and even a partial hijacking of the term into contexts different from those originally proposed by Habbershon and Williams in 1999. Based on these findings, we present a research agenda aimed at overcoming the current limitations and rejuvenating familiness as a suitable approach to understanding family firm heterogeneity. Keywords: familiness, familiness concept, familiness evolution, familiness definition, literature review, family business, family firms, family firm research, family business research, resources, competitive advantage, resource-based view