Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer in Family Entrepreneurship

Daniel P. Weber

Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer in Family Entrepreneurship

Author(s)	Dr. Daniel P. Weber
Country	United States
Abstract	Family entrepreneurship depends not only on transferring ownership and managerial authority across generations but also on preserving and renewing the knowledge through which entrepreneurial judgment has developed over time. Much of this knowledge is difficult to codify because it resides in accumulated experience, customer and supplier relationships, family narratives, intuition, operational routines, and context-specific understanding. This study conceptualizes intergenerational knowledge transfer as a bidirectional entrepreneurial capability through which incumbent and successor generations exchange, interpret, combine, and renew business knowledge. The framework integrates the knowledge-based view, family-business succession research, absorptive-capacity theory, relational perspectives, and transgenerational entrepreneurship. Because no primary family-enterprise dataset was supplied, a transparent simulation-based explanatory design was adopted. A synthetic dataset comprising 360 hypothetical family-enterprise profiles was generated using intergenerational knowledge-transfer capability, relational trust, successor absorptive capacity, tacit knowledge continuity, and entrepreneurial continuity and renewal as seven-point constructs. The simulated analysis indicated a strong positive association between intergenerational knowledge transfer and entrepreneurial continuity and renewal (r = 0.711). Successor absorptive capacity (r = 0.615), tacit knowledge continuity (r = 0.615), and relational trust (r = 0.574) were also positively associated with the outcome. A multivariate model incorporating the four predictors explained approximately 63.9% of simulated variation in entrepreneurial continuity and renewal. Mean renewal increased from 3.50 among very-low-transfer-maturity profiles to 5.65 among very-high-maturity profiles. These values are synthetic and should not be interpreted as observations from real family firms. The study argues that successful intergenerational transfer should neither reproduce the founder's knowledge unchanged nor discard accumulated family experience. Its strategic value lies in allowing successors to absorb inherited knowledge, combine it with external learning, and convert entrepreneurial legacy into renewed capability.
Keywords	intergenerational knowledge transfer, family entrepreneurship, succession, tacit knowledge, absorptive capacity, relational trust, transgenerational entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial renewal
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 5, Issue 3, May-June 2024
Published On	2024-05-20

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

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Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer in Family Entrepreneurship

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