Commitment to Learning and Open Innovation in Family Firms: Exploring the Moderating Effect of Family-to-firm Identity Fit

Abstract

The goal of this article is to investigate the influence of a family firm’s commitment to learning on open innovation. First, the research suggests that commitment to learning would allow the family firm to develop organisational knowledge useful to initiate and develop open innovations. Second, the conceptual model suggests that this relationship would be negatively moderated by the socio-emotional goal of family-to-the firm identification. Indeed, it is argued that a family firm’s identity preservation may inhibit open innovation because the firm may be reluctant to collaborate with other firms, or to license its intellectual property to others, for fear that this will erode its competitive advantage. While the first hypothesis is corroborated, unexpectedly the second is not, as the findings show that the stronger the identification, the stronger the influence that learning would have on open innovation.