Innovation in family businesses: a case study of GLSA

• Autor(a) principal: Filipe, Maria Isabel Morais Cardoso Ribeiro
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/19493
• topic: Family businesses; Tradition; Innovation; Willingness-ability paradox; Empresas familiares; Inovação; Tradição; Willingness-ability paradoxo

Nowadays, in a world where competion for market presence is fearless, innovating becomes essential for companies to survive and thrive. Given that the majority of companies worldwide a family business, it is relevant to understand how do these businesses act with regards to innovation. For many family business worldwide innovation is a distinction factor, that allows them to continue to exist throught different generations. In this context, the main purpose of the present dissertation is to understand to what extent are in fact family businesses more innovative than the other kind of enterprises and their capacity to innovate. For that purpose the literature review will, on a first stage address the family business’ relation with innovation, analysing different positions in literature on both the willingness and the abilty of these type of companies to innovate. On a second stage, a study on a family business – the GL company – is presented, in order to provide a practical example of an innovative family business. For the purpose of presenting an internal perspective on the company’s posture towards innovation, interviews were conducted to two senior family members - the CEO and a manager. The qualitative analysis of the interviews has provided practical insights on how GL behaves towards innovation, by applying the key concepts exposed on the literature review to the company’s reality. The theorectical aspects of the present thesis combined with GL’s case study intended to provide a comprehensive approach to the issues relating to the innovation processes within family businesses.