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Family firms and internationalization: An exploratory study on high-tech entrepreneurial ventures

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Abstract

This paper empirically explores a highly relevant, although poorly investigated topic: internationalization of family firms that operate in high-tech industries. Specifically, we compare internationalization of family and nonfamily entrepreneurial ventures in these industries. Relying on prior studies on internationalization of family firms, we speculate on how the specificities of high-tech industries shape the advantages and disadvantages of family entrepreneurial ventures in pursuing internationalization as compared with their nonfamily peers. In the empirical part of the paper, through a rigorous quantitative analysis of unique data from 264 Italian high-tech entrepreneurial ventures, we explore whether in high-tech industries family entrepreneurial ventures are more (or less) likely to pursue internationalization than their nonfamily counterparts. Surprisingly enough, our econometric estimates indicate that, in high-tech industries, family entrepreneurial ventures exhibit a higher internationalization propensity than their nonfamily peers.

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Notes

  1. Astrachan and Shanker (2003) have estimated that family firms generated 89 % of total tax returns, 64 % of GDP, and employ 62 % of the total workforce in the USA. Anderson and Reeb (2003) have shown that one third of the S&P 500 firms are controlled by the founding family.

  2. We define entrepreneurial ventures as young and owner-managed firms established to commercialize novel ideas developed by their founders.

  3. These capabilities include detecting new demand opportunities and leveraging the competitive advantage of foreign countries in the provision of low-cost and/or valuable resources (Alkhafaji 2003).

  4. In particular, many works have documented that family entrepreneurial ventures have lower export propensity (Crick et al. 2006; Fernandez and Nieto 2005, 2006; Gallo and Pont 1996; Graves and Thomas 2004, 2006; Menendez-Requejo 2005; Thomas and Graves 2005).

  5. Interestingly enough, the coefficient of LnNOwnerManagers i is positive although not significant in all the models (see Table 4). This might indicate that entrepreneurial ventures with more owner-managers can rely on a wider social network, thus having advantages when internationalizing their offering (see, e.g., Freeman 2008 for a similar argument).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, via Lambruschini 4/b, 20156, Milano, Italy

    Evila Piva & Cristina Rossi-Lamastra

  2. Center for Young and Family Enterprise (CYFE), University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Alfredo De Massis

  3. Department of Economics and Technology Management, Viale G. Marconi 5, 24044, Dalmine, BG, Italy

    Alfredo De Massis

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  1. Evila Piva
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  2. Cristina Rossi-Lamastra
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  3. Alfredo De Massis
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Correspondence to Alfredo De Massis.

Appendices

Appendix A: The RITA directory

The RITA directory was created at the end of 1999 to allow the RITA Observatory research team monitoring Italian high-tech entrepreneurial ventures, their economic, financial and managerial characteristics and post-entry performances in terms of innovation and growth. The directory was updated and extended through the inclusion of new firms in the years 2002, 2004, 2007, and 2009.

Any extensions of the directory first required the identification of the Italian firms that complied with three criteria: (1) being independent at founding time and having remained so, (2) being less than 25 years old, and (3) operating in high-tech industries. To identify these firms, a number of sources were used. These included lists provided by national industry associations, on-line and off-line commercial firm directories, and lists of participants in industry trades and expositions. The sources also included information provided by the national financial press, specialized magazines, and other sectoral studies. The identified firms constituted the target population. In 2009, the RITA Observatory research team also resorted to the national Chambers of Commerce to identify the population of Italian young high-tech firms (i.e., firms that complied with the last two criteria, at least). The population was identified by selecting the industry segments that included these firms from the Italian Classification of Economic Activities ATECO 2002. The resulting population included 49,616 young high-tech firms. Next, a subset of 14,395 firms was extracted. This sample was stratified according to the province (the third level in the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics codes) of firm location, the period of foundation and the industry. The 14,395 firms were included in the target population.

For each firm, a contact person (i.e., one of the owner–managers) was looked for. Whenever the contact person was identified, a questionnaire (or a link to an online survey page) was sent to him/her either by fax or by e-mail. The questionnaire included both questions about the characteristics of the firm (e.g., the alliance strategy, the internationalization activities, the innovation performance) and questions about the firm owner-managers. Answers to the questionnaire were checked for internal coherence by educated personnel and compared with any available public data. Moreover, several phone or face-to-face follow-up interviews were made to obtain missing data and correct the data collected. Information provided by nonowner-managed firms was not included in the directory.

The RITA directory also includes a series of data collected through secondary sources of information. Specifically, for all the firms included in the directory, the RITA Observatory research team collected information on (1) the patents granted by year (through the Esp@ce.net research engine), (2) the research projects funded by the European Union (through the Cordis website), and (3) financial and accounting data (obtained from the AiDA and Cerved commercial databases). Moreover, using information obtained by the national Chamber of Commerce, the RITA Observatory research team periodically checks whether the firms in the RITA directory have failed or have been acquired by (have merged with) other firms. The latest check was performed in 2010, thus originating the 2010 release of the RITA directory that we used in the present paper.

Appendix B

Table 5 Results of the estimates on the effect of family involvement on internationalization with sampling weights
Full size table
Table 6 Results of the estimates on the effect of family involvement on internationalization: correcting the survivorship bias
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Piva, E., Rossi-Lamastra, C. & De Massis, A. Family firms and internationalization: An exploratory study on high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. J Int Entrep 11, 108–129 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10843-012-0100-y

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