Familiness as Driver for Sustainable Innovation – Evidence from Family Businesses in the Wine Sector

Based on a field study of 28 family firms in Germany and Italy, we investigate how familiness can leverage sustainable innovations. Prior research highlights that family firms are less innovative. In contrast, our findings reveal that local embeddedness as well as congruent family and firm identity can stimulate sustainable innovations. However, we also show that they intentionally build up formal and informal institutions and therefore fulfill the role as change agents. Our work contributes to family firm research by detailing how a personal sustainable lifestyle of the owner together with local embeddedness can trigger sustainable product and process innovation which leads family firms to build institutions for sustainability."