"De-Familization" and Family Business Innovation

Can de-familization promote innovation in family firms? Existing research suggests that "de-familization" can promote innovation, but this may be due to the lack of dynamic attention to the process of "de-familization". Based on this, this paper investigates the impact of "de-familization" on the innovation of family firms, using Chinese listed family firms from 2008 to 2020 as a research sample. It is found that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between "de-familization" and family firms' innovation investment, while family members as CEOs and a favorable external institutional environment weaken this effect. This paper analyzes the impact of the degree of "de-familization" on the innovation level of family firms from a dynamic perspective, combining social-emotional wealth theory and agency theory, and thus enriches the research on the succession of family firms by professional managers in the context of inheritance, and provides new references for the selection of family business owners' successors.