This article focuses on risk taking as one important dimension of entrepreneurial orientation and its impact in family firms. Drawing on a sample of Swedish SMEs, we find that risk taking is a distinct dimension of entrepreneurial orientation in family firms and that it is positively associated with proactiveness and innovation. We also find that even if family firms do take risks while engaged in entrepreneurial activities, they take risk to a lesser extent than nonfamily firms. Moreover, and most importantly for our understanding of entrepreneurial orientation in family firms, we find that risk taking in family firms is negatively related to performance. Both theoretical and practical implications of our findings are provided.

Much progress has been made recently in developing the business model concept. However, one issue remains poorly understood, despite its importance for managers, policy makers, and academics alike, namely, how companies change and develop their business models to achieve sustained value creation. Companies which manage to create value over extended periods of time successfully shape, adapt and renew their business models to fuel such value creation. Drawing on findings from a research program on continuously growing firms, this paper identifies three critical capabilities, namely an orientation towards experimenting with and exploiting new business opportunities; a balanced use of resources; as well as achieving coherence between leadership, culture, and employee commitment, together shaping key strategizing actions. Moreover, we illustrate how each of these capabilities is supported by different sets of specific activities. Jointly, these three capabilities, their activities and the strategizing actions act as complementarities for value creation. We conclude the paper by suggesting implications for research and practitioners, providing a tool for managers which allows them to reflect on and identify critical issues relevant for changing and developing their business model to sustain value creation.2

This research focuses on family-controlled firms as an important type of family firms, and demonstrates how external parties in the governance (ownership and board of directors) can serve as a catalyst for their internationalization. Our framework also embraces the moderating effects of the competitive environmental heterogeneity and past performance on the relationship between external, nonfamily involvement in governance, and internationalization (scale and scope). The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 351 Swedish familycontrolled firms. Our findings extend previous research on family firms and their internationalization, especially addressing some of the prior mixed findings, and offers implications for both theory and practice.

The current growth literature has stalled over which measures to use in empirical studies, causing a fragmented theory base. This paper claims that there is a third issue that further curbs efforts in developing a better understanding of business growth. Based on a thorough literature review, a quantitative, and a qualitative study, we find that academic scholars and entrepreneurs do not talk about the same thing when they say "business growth." For practitioners, growth is a more complex phenomenon-with a strong emphasis on internal development-which differs from the simplified conceptualization of growth used in empirical studies.

We ask whether choices aimed at preserving socioemotional wealth (SEW) represent an asset or a liability in family-controlled firms. Specifically, we consider one major SEW-preserving mechanism -having as CEO a member of the controlling family -and hypothesize that this choice is (1) an asset in business contexts, such as industrial districts, in which tacit rules and social norms are relatively more important, but (2) a potential liability in contexts like stock exchange markets, where formal regulations and transparency principles take centre stage. The results from our empirical analysis confirm these hypotheses.