Abstract
New digital paradigms have pushed many firms to place a strong emphasis on their organizational capabilities to innovate their business models. Consequently, the set of capabilities required to cope with these new digital paradigms and innovation has been drastically changing. We examine the heterogeneity of organizations’ capabilities and introduce such capabilities as a key driver of digital business model innovation (BMI) in family and non-family firms.
Based on unique survey data from 1,444 German family and non-family firms, we examine organizational capabilities in terms of knowledge exploitation, entrepreneurial capability, risk management, networking, development and change management, as well as market and customer knowledge, showing that this wide range of heterogeneous organizational capabilities in combination fully mediates the positive relationship between family influence and digital BMI.
However, when examined individually, our findings reveal that not all the different capability types play the same role. Taken together, these findings highlight that the effect of family influence on digital innovation is more complex than previously thought, holding important implications for the digital innovation and family business literature, and offering important insights into the crucial role of capabilities in the digital economy.