PurposeWithin a very short period of time, the worldwide pandemic triggered by the novel coronavirus has not only claimed numerous lives but also caused severe limitations to daily private as well as business life. Just about every company has been affected in one way or another. This first empirical study on the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on family firms allows initial conclusions to be drawn about family firm crisis management.Design/methodology/approachExploratory qualitative research design based on 27 semi-structured interviews with key informants of family firms of all sizes in five Western European countries that are in different stages of the crisis.FindingsThe COVID-19 crisis represents a new type and quality of challenge for companies. These companies are applying measures that can be assigned to three different strategies to adapt to the crisis in the short term and emerge from it stronger in the long run. Our findings show how companies in all industries and of all sizes adapt their business models to changing environmental conditions within a short period of time. Finally, the findings also show that the crisis is bringing about a significant yet unintended cultural change. On the one hand, a stronger solidarity and cohesion within the company was observed, while on the other hand, the crisis has led to a tentative digitalization.Originality/valueTo the knowledge of the authors, this is the first empirical study in the management realm on the impacts of COVID-19 on (family) firms. It provides cross-national evidence of family firms' current reactions to the crisis.

Business model innovation is a topic that has received much attention from academia as well as from business practice. After extensive research on the definition and conceptualization of the concept and publication of many case-based results, recently scholars have been calling for more generalizable results, large-scale investigations and greater empirical sophistication. Despite the great importance of measuring business model innovation for various purposes, a validated measurement scale is still not available. I fill this gap by systematically developing a new scale for business model innovation. I follow a rigorous scale development approach to ensure validity and reliability. Specifically, I collected two large-scale samples of 126 and 232 firms to specify and assess the scale. As a result, I provide a hierarchical three-level scale for measuring business model innovation. At the first level, 41 reflective items are provided to measure ten subconstructs of business model innovation. These can be used as formative measures of three dimensions of business model innovation at the second level, namely value creation innovation, value proposition innovation and value capture innovation. At the third level, these three dimensions form the metaconstruct of business model innovation.

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This study investigates how the circular economy and business models are related in the current business and management literature. Based on bibliometric analytical procedures, 253 articles were retrieved from the Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect scientific databases. The articles were analyzed according to network analysis principles, and key terms were mapped into a network. We used VOSviewer to build the network, explore the most-researched terms and their relationships, and identify less-explored terms and research gaps. We furthermore conducted a qualitative review of selected publications to provide an illustration of quantitative results and delve deeper into the research topics. The main findings revealed the networks of current topics as they appear in the publications such as business models, the circular economy, circular business models, value, supply chain, transition, resource, waste, and reuse, and their most prevalent relationships. The results also highlighted several emerging topics such as those connected with managerial, supply-side, demand-side, networking, performance, and contextual considerations of circular business models.

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