The Agile Innovation Pendulum: Family Business Innovation and the Human, Social, and Marketing Capitals

This article constitutes the first of two parts of a research aiming to investigate innovation in family businesses (FBs) and to present a consumer-focused conduit to agility in the strategic marketing multicultural context. The current article studies FBs’ innovativeness in the context of their “familiness,” focusing on the question of how FBs’ human, social/multicultural, and marketing capitals fare in comparison to non-FBs. The research findings are supportive of FBs’ potentialities, indicating an inherent “genetic” disposition towards agile innovation. The research further underlines the need for a new agility framework for FBs, to bear into consideration their transformed (agile) innovation factors and the marketing realities of contemporary business, a task undertaken by the second part of this study. Methodologically, the research retains a scientifically founded exactitude, balancing the primary, the theoretical, and the conceptual countenances through a mixed inductive-deductive approach. The current article is based on a narrative theoretical and quantitative primary data (survey) analyses. The research’s contribution relates to its uncovering of the true FBs’ innovation potentialities; its theoretical linkage to the subjects of agility, strategic marketing and consumer behavior; and their conceptual incorporation into a unified framework (the “Agile Innovation Pendulum”) with explicit scholarly and executive implications.