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This paper aims to shed light on how family firms execute open innovation strategies by managing internal and external knowledge flows.

First, through a comprehensive literature review, the paper identifies the barriers to the acquisition and transfer of knowledge in open innovation processes. Second, it presents and discusses the results of an exploratory case study on Loccioni, an Italian family firm providing high-tech measurement solutions, highlighting how this family firm managed to overcome the barriers in executing an open innovation strategy.

The case study shows that Loccioni faced specific challenges in acquiring and transferring knowledge in its open innovation processes and developed two idiosyncratic capabilities – labelled imprinting and fraternization – that helped the firm overcome the barriers to knowledge acquisition and transfer. The analysis shows that these two capabilities are enabled by the distinctive goals and social capital characterizing family firms.

The paper creates a link between open innovation and family business research with an empirically grounded model illustrating how the idiosyncratic capabilities of a family firm help overcome the critical barriers to the acquisition and transfer of knowledge in executing an open innovation strategy.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

The authors develop a systematic literature review of research on family multinationals, i.e. firms owned by one or more families that engage in foreign direct investments (FDIs). Building on the examination of past and current research, the authors develop an integrative framework and identify directions to advance this area of research.

Coherently with recommendations for systematic literature reviews, the authors developed and followed a systematic search protocol, selecting and reviewing 92 articles on family multinationals published from 1991 to 2021. The authors then identified the most recurrent and emerging themes in these studies to build an integrative framework.

In recent years, the literature on family firm internationalization has grown exponentially, and with it the focus on family multinationals. However, the study of family multinationals has many theoretical and methodological shortcomings that have only allowed marginally appreciating their entrepreneurial aspects. In this study, the authors take stock to identify the critical knowledge gaps and motivate future researchers to fill this breach.

In conducting the first systematic literature review of family multinationals, the authors provide an integrative account of current knowledge, develop a reconciling framework and identify directions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine affective commitment, normative commitment, and continuance commitment in a cross-national context to identify if the effect of country-specific cultural orientation on organizational commitment of faculty in higher education functions invariably in different countries.

The work expands on Meyer and Allen’s (1991) three-component model of organizational commitment. It includes relevant literature review on ten countries and the results of a survey of university faculty members, assessing their institutions’ human resources practices and their effect on organizational commitment. Basic descriptive statistics were performed on nominal and interval data, means, medians, and standard deviations were computed, and tests of mean equivalence, including ANOVA tests, were performed. In certain instances, Pearson and Spearman correlations were computed to ascertain correlation, and χ² tests for randomized response were used, while Cronbach’s α test helped to establish survey instrument validity.

Though certain differences may exist between different countries and cultures with respect to the three-component model of organizational commitment, there is strong evidence of the existence of invariance and, thus, generalizability of the model across cultures.

Cultural studies have focused on differences in organizational commitment at national levels. Further attempts to identify the universality of factors leading to organizational commitment should account for culture in the study of employee-related globalization issues in higher education institutes. Knowledge of cultural impact is also useful from a managerial perspective, and for the design of relevant strategies.

National context plays a major role in shaping the nature of educational institutions. This study brings out the need for a deeper understanding of invariance in organizational commitment (inter-alia, through the three-component model).

This study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between organizational commitment and its various antecedents, including human resources management practices, for faculty in higher education institutes.

The purpose of this paper is to study nanotech technical and scientific seminars (TSS) companies from a managerial perspective. Specifically, it means to: firstly, understand how TSS firms manage the sale of their services; and secondly, to identify the implications that different approaches in the TSS sale management have on the client firm's innovation process.

First, a literature analysis identifies the critical variables of a service sale management model for nanotech TSS firms. Then, an empirical investigation involving ten nanotech Italian companies was conducted. The empirical results were analytically generalised and integrated with suggestions from the literature to provide general insights into the research topic.

The paper shows that nanotech TSS companies adopt two alternative models for managing their service sale: a customised approach and a standardised one. They differ in terms of: management of the commercial relationship; phases of interaction with the client firm; and degree of standardisation of the provided service.

Because of the applied research methodology, the findings can be generalised to TSS companies offering services in the field of nanotechnology, although implications for similar technology‐intensive sectors are discussed.

The two TSS sale management models have different implications on the client's innovation process, in terms of: firstly, structure of the process itself and, secondly, applied managerial and organisational practices. These effects should be considered by the innovator that wants to fully exploit the potentiality of the acquired service.

So far, TSS have been analysed in the literature from the client firm's point of view. The paper widens this perspective, since it considers the two opposite viewpoints in the TSS sale: the service supplier's and the service buyer's.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the presence of the family variable within a business enterprise and the managerial factors affecting the success of new product development (NPD). This can be structured into three research questions: What is the relationship between the presence of the family variable within a business enterprise and the managerial factors affecting the success of NPD activities? How the managerial factors affecting the NPD process are faced in family firms? Which are the main differences (e.g. strengths and/or weaknesses) in dealing with the managerial factors affecting the NPD process between family and non‐family firms?

The study employs a grounded‐theory and case‐study approach to investigate the relationship between the presence of the family variable within a business enterprise and the managerial factors affecting the success of NPD. The starting point is an in‐depth literature review on the managerial factors differentiating family from non‐family firms, and the managerial factors affecting NPD success. Then, a multiple case‐study on five Italian family firms and five Italian non‐family enterprises is conducted. The case‐studies lead to the development of an empirically grounded theoretical framework that outlines how the distinctive characteristics of family businesses are related to the managerial factors affecting NPD success.

Family firms clearly emerge as more long‐term oriented than non‐family enterprises. The long‐term orientation of family businesses vs non‐family companies seems to play a pivotal role in originating NPD projects with long‐term thrust. If a company is long‐term oriented it is reasonable to expect that it will put its long‐term vision in NPD programs, thus reaching a NPD long‐term thrust.

The study advances research on strategic innovation and NPD in family vs non‐family firms. It develops new theory at the important intersection of family business and innovation/NPD research, filling a gap in the literature and providing justification and guidance for the design of more comprehensive studies. Future research could investigate and test the theoretical framework on a wider empirical base, using either qualitative or quantitative methods.

The paper addresses the failure of innovation management research to recognize, embrace, and deliberately incorporate family firms. It therefore fills a gap in the literature and extends prior research by introducing specific propositions that are supported by the case data and originally integrating them in the general research stream on NPD and family‐firm characteristics. The originality of the study lies also in the fact that it appears to be the first comparative analysis on this specific topic involving both family and non‐family enterprises.

This paper aims to analyze the thematic content of research addressing the relation between board of directors (BoD) and business transformation (BT) to obtain better understanding of status and to derive future areas of study.

This paper reviews literature through a bibliometric analysis based on co-occurrence of articles published in Web of Science Core Collection ™ (WoS) between 1990 and 2022, identifying key concepts, setting network of relations and identifying the strategic importance of clusters of concepts. Findings and implications are discussed, future lines of research are presented and limitations are noted.

Thematic research on boards addressing transformation shifted from the analysis of individuals' traits to an organizational approach with majority of research centered on the role of boards under different theories and the consequences of strategic changes on firm's performance. Further research is around gender diversity, sustainability and the moderating role of ownership structure and business culture.

Some limitations are also noted. This analysis considered articles indexed by WoS for Q1+Q2 publications as source of literature, while including others such as Scopus would increase knowledge base. Also, to identify main streams of research, the authors considered keywords with cumulative occurrence spanning from 30% to 40% while increasing this percentage would add terms that might improve precision to the connections among keywords. Other techniques could have been used such as co-citation or bibliographic coupling, although the authors find these as better suited to investigate the basic structure behind the foundational knowledge of the topic while the authors’ intention was to understand the positioning of study fields regarding the degree of research progress.

This paper presents some practical implications for future researchers. Those who wish to leverage previous evidence to address new research questions might look into principal themes covering BoD dynamics and composition to exert CG, and the relation between strategic decisions and performance measured by different variables. Those who wish to position their research as new findings to shed light on dilemmas, might find opportunities in the fields of climate change-sustainability, R&D for growth and innovation under the perspective of intangible assets.

This paper, is the first to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to identify research clusters for the intersection of boards and transformation and to determine their stage of development.

本文旨在分析探討董事會與業務轉型之間的關係的學術研究的專題內容，以能對有關課題的研究狀況有更深入的了解，並擬從分析中取得未來可供研究的範疇。

本文透過科學計量分析法來進行文獻探討。方法乃基於在1990年至2022年期間在Web of Science Core Collection 刊載的學術論文的共現分析而進行; 透過這個研究方法，研究人員建立了聯繫的網絡，並確認了各個概念群組的策略重要性。在本文中，研究結果和研究結果帶來的啟示會被討論，未來的研究領域和方針也會得到說明，研究的局限也會被認定和記錄下來。

探討董事會而又涉及業務轉型的專題研究，由當初集中探討董事個人的特質、轉移到現在研究整體的組織理念和處事取向，而就後者來說，大部份的研究都集中於在不同的理論框架裡董事會所扮演的角色，以及因策略上的改變而為公司的業績帶來的影響。進一步的學術研究都是圍繞著性別多元化、可持續性、所有權結構所扮演的緩和角色和商業文化的研究。

盡我們所知，本文乃為首篇學術論文，去鑑定關於董事會與業務轉型之間的關聯的研究集群，也是首篇學術論文，去確定這些研究集群的發展階段。

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

The paper is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Studies into different organization types often overlook family‐run enterprises. But research is important because the structure of such organizations can have a considerable influence on their approach to issues like innovation and new product development (NPD). Indeed, the family variable has the power to moderate the impact of other factors on the chance of successfully executing such activities. Scoring a hit is difficult enough in the first place. There is never any guarantee of success and failure rates are costly and alarmingly high. Risk and uncertainty thus remain the norm where innovation is concerned. In order to unearth those winning products, companies need to excel in all the right areas. These include the processes associated with NPD, organizational capabilities and culture, leadership and the NPD strategy.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The paper saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

This article provides commentary from well-known family business researchers on what they have learnt about the family business field and tips for the future.

Well-known family business management researchers were contacted in order to provide their feedback on the field of family business management. Their responses were then curated into an article that can help others learn from their advice.

The family business management researchers provided suggestions on how to succeed in the field of family business management and advice for current and future researchers. Thereby helping to advance the field and provide new novel research ideas that can help science as well as practice.

This article is amongst the first to provide verbatim advice from the leading family business management scholars. Thus, providing original and innovative ideas about what is needed in the field of family business management.