Paper Title
Succession, Familiness And Innovation In Family Firms: Evidence From Taiwan's Small- And Medium-Sized Manufacturing Firms

Abstract
We explored “familiness” through successors’ participation by interviewing the entrepreneurs/predecessors and successors of three family firms, and illustrated how family firms strengthen incremental innovation through the resource-bundling process. The results showed that the interaction between entrepreneurs’ industrial technology and social networks and successors’ educational experience and professional ability shape and enhance the richness of familiness. Most successors that join family firms are influenced by the external environment. When they are involved in the family firm’s business operations, they change familiness by bringing in new resources and introducing different management styles, thereby affecting the firm’s innovative behavior. The educational experience and professional ability of successors enable them to generate novel thoughts and ideas, and they tend to use the stabilizing and enriching bundling process to develop the technological capabilities of family firms, thereby allowing the firms to follow a path-dependent incremental technological innovation. Regarding predecessors, their depth of knowledge about industrial technology and social networking enables them to generate novel thoughts and ideas from their extensive contacts and they tend to use the enriching and pioneering bundling process to strengthen the industrial technological capabilities of family firms, allowing them to follow a path-creating radical technological innovation. Index Terms- Succession, Familiness, Innovation, Family Firm.