An innovation gap between family and non-family businesses: a case study of post-transition economies

We empirically explore the differences in innovativeness between family and nonfamily businesses in selected post-transition economies. The data for Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia are derived from the 2018 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Adult Population Survey. We build a binary logistic regression model. Results suggest that family businesses are less likely to be innovators as compared to the non-family businesses but, after including a combination of individual and environmental/institutional factors into the model, being a family business is not significant when comparing innovative and imitative businesses. We also find that gender, age, education, perceived opportunities and perceived entrepreneurial skills are not significant indicators of business innovativeness within the investigated sample.