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Family businesses everywhere are responding to Covid-19 in profound ways, balancing the need to preserve cherished family traditions and social capital against the mandate to control costs at a time of economic peril. In this video, also available here as a podcast, professors Mat Hughes and Alfredo De Massis talk about how the pandemic is forcing reckonings in five realms -- including succession, internal and external relationships, financial health versus social health, long-term orientation versus the need to adapt, and balancing future wealth against the need for more liquidity. De Massis also shares insights from his study of a resilient family that weathered four different catastrophes and emerged stronger from each one.

Governments across the world outsource service delivery to external agents, but does ownership matter for service delivery value? Though theory points to clear ownership differences on effectiveness, there remains limited empirical evidence of the impact of ownership on citizens’ satisfaction. Focusing on local authorities in England, we draw on secondary data (2007 and 2009) to examine if ownership type matters. The findings indicate that ownership–public, non-profit, private–confers no direct benefits for citizens’ satisfaction suggesting that the outsourcing decision should not rely on unfounded assumptions about performance differentials between ownership types. The implications for public management are explored.

This report investigates the depth and nature of entrepreneurship and innovation in family firms. It sets out the findings and recommendations from new research into the entrepreneurial orientation of private family firms in the UK, the drivers of this orientation, and the impact this has on innovation activity and financial performance. The project has been funded by the Institute for Family Business Research Foundation and conducted by researchers from three UK business schools – Imperial College Business School, Durham University Business School and Lancaster University Management School. The project findings draw upon the first large-scale survey of UK family companies to examine their entrepreneurial orientation, innovation and performance. We complement survey data with brief case studies and highlight good practices that will help family firms to continue to innovate and to ensure their business constantly adapts to changing market needs.