DME Seminar - Innovation in Family Firms: A Frame Flexibility Perspective

Presenter - Dr Xinrui Zhang

Title: Innovation in Family Firms: A Frame Flexibility Perspective

Abstract

Prior studies show family firms are more conservative in innovation, while recent research found they frame risk-taking less narrowly. Based on Raffaelli et al.’s (2019) frame flexibility, we extend narrow-framing into a process, arguing that the unique non-economic endowment enables family firms to frame flexibly — through entrepreneurial identity, new competencies, and external networks — thereby driving greater innovation than non-family firms. Using 13,289 firm-year observations from 9,266 innovative UK firms, our arguments are supported. Our study advances narrow-framing research in family business toward a frame-flexibility perspective and bridges innovation and family business literatures by positioning family firms as distinctive risk framers.

Speaker Biography: Dr Xinrui Zhang is a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Henley Business School, University of Reading. Her research focuses on how temporal orientation in family businesses shapes their entrepreneurial activities, responsible behaviour and adaptive capacity, drawing on institutional and behavioural perspectives and applying quantitative methods to large-scale longitudinal datasets. Her work has been published in Family Business Review and has received Best Paper Awards at the International Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Family Business. She is an editorial board member of Management and Organization Review and a reviewer for several leading journals.