Strategic entrepreneurship within family-controlled firms: Opportunities and challenges

A firm engages in strategic entrepreneurship when it simultaneously pursues exploration for future business domains and exploitation of current domains. Superior performance often results from successful strategic entrepreneurship. A growing body of literature addresses the opportunities and challenges created when a firm attempts to stand out in both exploration and exploitation. To date, however, this literature has focused on strategic entrepreneurship without distinguishing the role of family involvement. We seek to address this gap by theorizing that family involvement, shaped by four key dimensions of identity, justice, nepotism, and conflict, creates differences in the nature of strategic entrepreneurship between family-controlled and non-family firms. Based on these four dimensions, we develop a set of propositions describing potential positive and negative implications for strategic entrepreneurship in family-controlled firms.