Antecedents to Entrepreneurship: How Successful Business Families Nurture Agency and Kindle the Dreams of the Next Generation

The family is the natural incubator in which entrepreneurial ideas are conceived, hatched, and nurtured. Whether pushed into entrepreneurship by hardship and sheer force of circumstance or pulled into it by the pursuit of an imagined business possibility, it is often an entrepreneur’s family—with its complex array of personalities, expectations, obligations, resources, relationships, dynamics, and dysfunctions—that stimulates and guides the transformation of individual aspirations into viable businesses. That families naturally vary in their capacity to stimulate entrepreneurship raises the question of how best to promote and bolster entrepreneurial qualities across a wide range of families, businesses, and, crucially, the unique characteristics that make up these intimate networks. The chapter focuses on the practical nurturing of agency as it relates to successful entrepreneurship seeking to understand the origins, commonalities, and potential applications of familial practices that we have documented in the course of over thirty-five years working with business families. The chapter also introduces the use of entrepreneurial funds to promote entrepreneurship through the education, support, and funding of entrepreneurial initiatives of family members as a tool to institutionalize the process of promoting entrepreneurship across generations.