The family innovator’s dilemma revisited: Examining the association between family influence and incumbents’ adoption of discontinuous technologies

We use data on U.S. retailers’ responses to the advent of electronic commerce to empirically examine central elements of König, Kammerlander, and Enders’ (KKE 2013) framework on how family influence affects firms’ adoption of discontinuous technologies. We operationalize family influence using: (1) a manifest dichotomous measure of (non-)family firms; (2) a manifest multi-item measure of the “four Cs”; and (3) a language-based measure of the degree to which top managers’ cognition is oriented towards the four Cs. We find that the manifest dichotomous measure is unrelated to adoption speed, but negatively linked to adoption aggressiveness. The manifest multi-item measure is associated with faster and less aggressive adoption. Finally, the language-based measure is linked to slower but more aggressive adoption. These seemingly equivocal results offer empirical reference points for reflecting on KKE’s framework, including the implications of the ability and willingness in family firms for discontinuous technology adoption. We also address the intricacies of testing conceptual research on family influence.