PurposeThis paper attempts to shed light on the effect of educational programmes aimed at entrepreneurs on innovation and business success.Design/methodology/approachWe use as theoretical framework the theory of planned behaviour. We use a sample of 354 entrepreneurs from Castile and Leon, Spain. To estimate the model we use a path analysis (AMOS 7).FindingsIndividuals who are concerned about further management education and entrepreneurship education show themselves to be more innovative. Moreover, indirectly, by means of the relationship between innovation and success, specific entrepreneurship education contributes to obtaining better business results. However, to have reached high levels of formal education makes entrepreneurs less conformist regarding the activity of innovation. The existence of a direct effect of innovative behaviour on business success is confirmed.Research limitationsThe limitations which our study presents are principally related to the measurement of the variables. Some of the characteristics of education should be studied more deeply.Practical implicationsThe results obtained lead us to recommend that the educational centres and institutions which organise the programmes should give preference to specialised education and less to entrepreneurship education when seeking to reinforce the innovative spirit of the entrepreneurs.Originality/valueThe debate concerning the effectiveness of entrepreneurship educational programmes is still undecided, so much so that both supporters and detractors of entrepreneurship education exist. For that reason, this paper aims to shed some light on the effects of the educational programmes aimed at the entrepreneur.

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Succession is a concern for most family firms. The literature has addressed succession in family firms from different perspectives. However, there are still unaddressed questions concerning the microfoundations of succession, and there is a need to secure a better understanding of the succession process and what role parents play therein. Using the dynamic capabilities approach, we shed light on the influence of parents’ behaviors on successors’ intentions. In particular, the paper pursues a twofold aim; first, to analyze the effect of learning mechanisms that parents deliberately use with their children in the family firm on the succession dynamic capability; and second, to explore the impact of this dynamic capability of successor intention to continue in the family firm. We test the model on a sample of potential successors of family firms in Spain. Using partial least squares (PLS) for a sample of 9146 individuals, we confirm the positive impact of the use of parents’ deliberate learning mechanisms on succession dynamic capability and, in turn, the positive effect of the created succession dynamic capability on the successor’s intention to continue the family firm. Furthermore, we find that perceived self-efficacy fails to have any effect on successor intention.

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