Heritage Assets: A Meaningful Basis For Internationalization?

Sammanfattning: A family’s involvement and ownership of a firm separates family firms from both public companies and other private firms. It is widely accepted that family firms have unique characteristics, with implications for their behavior and an impact on their internationalization. Extant research presents a need for studies on the heterogeneity observed in family firm internationalization, and has presented non-human heritage assets as one concept which may help explain this heterogeneity. These assets are non-human resources which hold a special meaning and connection to the family. However, this concept has not been empirically investigated, and remains in the theoretical domain. The aim of this paper is to develop an initial understanding of non-human heritage assets: how such assets present themselves in family firms and how they constrain or facilitate family firms’ internationalization decisions. The internationalization decisions studied in this paper are location choice and operation mode choice. To understand if non-human heritage assets facilitate or constrain the decision-making process in these two areas, this paper conducts qualitative semi-structured interviews with seven Swedish family firms. The results identified four non-human heritage assets in these firms: reputation, founding location, networks and family culture. The family firm’s networks and reputation both had a facilitating effect on specific location and operation mode choices. The founding location had a constraining effect on some operation mode choices. The family culture was not found to have either a facilitating or constraining effect on either choice. Keywords: family firms, internationalization, heritage assets, location choice, operation mode choice, bifurcation bias.