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Introduction
Innovation is vital to the survival of family firms (Chrisman and Patel, 2012; De Massis et al., 2012; Miller et al., 2015; Sciascia et al., 2015). Without innovation, family firms are at risk of losing competitive advantage, witness their products and services become obsolete, and lose market share to new and existing competitors (Konig et al., 2013). Radical innovation to devise truly new products and services has been described as the “lifeblood of firms” (Slater et al., 2013, p.552). However, family firms often innovate less than traditional firms (Llach and Nordqvist, 2010) because of concerns about wealth preservation (Filser et al., 2018), avoid risk-taking as a route to wealth endangerment (De Massis et al., 2014), have poorly developed innovation capabilities (Sciascia et al., 2015), and exhibit family entrenchment (Anderson and Reeb, 2003) and family orientation lock (Herrero and Hughes, 2019) that diminish the incentive to pursue new innovations (Gast et al., 2018; Kraus et al., 2018). These conditions lead family firms to innovate more incrementally rather than radically (Calabrò et al., 2018; Nieto et al., 2015; Roessl et al., 2010; Wright et al., 2016).
Radical innovations carry significant risk and uncertainties with unpredictable rates of success and acknowledged high failure rates (Barczak et al., 2009; Evanschitsky et al., 2011; Rubera and Kirca, 2012), often unpalatable to family firms. An absence of radical innovation, however, is especially dangerous because it renders the long-term viability of the family firm at risk. Despite a sizeable body of research on family firm innovation in general, only a proportion of studies differentiate by type of innovation and urgent calls have emerged for studies into types of innovation, particularly the conditions for truly novel innovations (Calabrò et al., 2018; De Massis et al., 2015a). This gap in research is of paramount importance. The conditions and skills needed for radical innovation are substantially different to incremental innovation (Bouncken et al., 2018; Dewar and Dutton, 1986; Ettlie et al., 1984; Evanschitsky et al., 2011; Slater et al., 2013).
Radical innovation is defined as the commercialization of an entirely novel idea, which is new to the markets (Bouncken et al.,...