Absorptive capacity in family firms: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Two-thirds of all businesses worldwide are family firms. For these family firms, absorptive capacity (AC) is key to acquiring, assimilating, transforming, and exploiting new, external knowledge for purposes of value creation. In this study, we conduct a literature review to obtain an overview of the existing research on AC in family firms. Drawing on 27 articles, we show that because of the family members’ induced influence on the family firm, the findings from previous studies based on non-family businesses cannot be applied to family businesses. In fact, we demonstrate that this influence can even create ambiguous effects on the integration of AC into the firm.