Family firms and entrepreneurship: Contradiction or synonym?

Extract: This Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (JSBE) Special Issue was motivated by increasing intellectual curiosity from within the entrepreneurship academic community to study entrepreneurial phenomenon in a family business context. Family enterprises dominate the commercial landscape in all economies, and interest in the unique challenges facing this business genre is growing. In many family firms, ownership and management are maintained across several generations, and a key challenge for long-term survival is to sustain the entrepreneurial spirit of the founding generation of entrepreneurs (Littunen and Hyrsky, 2000). All firms regularly need to renew their way of doing business in order to stay competitive, as they risk losing their entrepreneurial capacity when they mature (Kellermanns and Eddleston, 2006). However, family firms face many additional challenges with regard to entrepreneurship (Zahra, Hayton and Salvato, 2004).