Jose Carlos Casillas

Purpose: The paper aims to understand how family businesses of foreign origin manage the paradox between preserving the cultural legacy of the country of origin through the family and integrating into the culture of the country in which the company is present. Design/methodology/approach: A sample of 490 small and medium-sized Spanish family businesses of Muslim, Chinese and local (Spanish) origin is studied, using nested ANOVA as the statistical analysis tool, with regression analysis for a robustness check. Findings: The empirical analysis confirm that firms founded by foreign entrepreneurs tend to be smaller in terms of sales, assets, and number of employees than locally founded firms. This difference persists even into the second generation, suggesting that founding decisions leave a lasting imprint on organisational structure. Research limitations/implications: The main limitation consists in the use of surnames as a proxy to identify cultural origin, which may not fully capture the complexity of founders’ identities. Practical implications: The paper shows that foreign-origin firms tend to operate with more contained structures and conservative financial strategies can help design support policies better aligned with their needs. For institutional actors such as banks or development agencies, these findings may help refine evaluation and legitimisation criteria, reducing biases that penalise business models differing from the dominant one. Originality/value: Our research extends the concept of liability of foreignness to the field of family firms, showing how it becomes an imprinting of liability insofar as the liabilities inherent to a foreign-origin firm persist over time.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems in various geographical areas of the world are often compared in the context of entrepreneurship research. There are far fewer comparative studies on different types of ecosystems. In this study, a traditional entrepreneurial ecosystem based in Canada is compared with a digital entrepreneurial ecosystem specializing in life sciences, in Switzerland, bridging the gap between both and yielding previously unknown insights. The aim is twofold: to decipher both the differences and the similarities between the two models and to describe the predominant type of entrepreneurship in each case. The method consisted of a quantitative study of socio-economic data in combination with the administration of a qualitative analysis of interviews with—industry, government, and university—experts with links to one or the other ecosystem. The main findings showed that the traditional ecosystem had varied entrepreneurial support, public financial support, and collaborative networks between SMEs and start-ups, whereas in the specialized digital ecosystem, business support tended to be sector-specific with private financial support and networks emerging between multinationals and start-ups. Our study contributes to entrepreneurship research by showing that high-tech industries such as biotechnology and medical technology manage to go beyond a purely digital approach in digital ecosystems. The generic nature of the high-tech industries within the traditional ecosystem was the main driver of traditional entrepreneurship, while the sector-specific approaches of the industries within the specialized digital ecosystems were shown to drive innovative entrepreneurship.

Time is often neglected as a factor in international business research. In this paper, objective and subjective perspectives of time are incorporated into the study of speed of a firm's internationalisation process. The concept of speed is defined as the relationship between distance and time, and therefore we propose a theoretical framework that applies these two perspectives of time both to distance and to time, and differentiate between three levels of analysis: individual, organisational, and environmental. Our framework also incorporates two mediating constructs: learning speed and risk perception. Ten hypotheses are proposed that contribute towards a better understanding of the temporal dimension of the internationalisation process.

A pesar de que las empresas familiares representan un gran porcentaje del conjunto de empresas a nivel mundial, las aportaciones metodológicas acerca de su estimación son muy escasas. El presente trabajo ofrece una metodología de identificación de empresas familiares versus no familiares utilizando como fuente de información la base de datos SABI Informa (versión española de Orbis), considerando fundamentalmente variables de propiedad y de gobierno corporativo para su clasificación. El diseño de la metodología SAFER permite su aplicación sin necesidad de realizar una extracción masiva de datos, lo que contribuye a su accesibilidad y facilidad de uso por parte de los investigadores. Asimismo, la metodología propuesta ha sido testada utilizando una muestra de 500 empresas, encontrando un error de clasificación inferior al cinco por ciento. Este trabajo aporta a los investigadores una metodología consensuada para la selección de muestras de empresas familiares, pudiendo ser trasladada a bases de datos equivalentes en otros países (e.g., AIDA, Italian company data o Markus en Alemania), o escaladas a la base de datos Orbis de ámbito global. Finalmente, nuestros resultados también representan un avance al facilitar la labor de los profesionales y responsables políticos en el desarrollo de informes sobre empresas familiares a través de un proceso riguroso de identificación y clasificación.

Europe accumulates a wide business tradition. Many European family businesses have several centuries of history, contributing to the generation of the European identity itself. In this entry, we analyse family businesses from the European perspective in relation to its own definition, its characteristics and the existing national differences on the continent, assuming the heterogeneity of the continent, very fragmented in small and medium sized countries. We state the commonly accepted conception of a family business in Europe and we address the structure of this type of business, around the concept of “household — Casa —)”. We describe the European demographics of family businesses and identify the most relevant worldwide, making reference to German Mittelstands, as an interesting case of innovative family businesses in Europe.

This article deals with two important concepts in the prior literature on the internationalization process: age at entry and export experience. Against previous research, we analyze how both of them influence simultaneously international behavior in the early stages of the internationalization process as a trade-off. For that aim, we analyze the influence of both variables on international behavior in the early stages of the internationalization process, from a dynamic perspective, looking at initial export behavior and speed during this period. We analyze export development process of 106 Spanish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), most of them international new ventures, in their first 8 years of export activity, combining the effect of age at entry and experiential learning during this period, finding that age at entry and export experience exert not only a direct effect but also a moderation influence on initial export development, observing a trade-off between such influence as experience grows. JEL CLASSIFICATION: M16

This article analyzes retrenchment strategies that family businesses adopt during periods of crisis. From a socioemotional wealth perspective, we propose that the influence of family board members and family CEOs on retrenchment depends on survival risk. We collected empirical data from companies on the Spanish Stock Exchange (2008-2012). Our findings reveal that family involvement intensifies retrenchment when performance is declining, and that retrenchment intensifies when survival is at risk. We also demonstrate that family firms are able to implement retrenchment measures when required to improve their performance.