Family Business Successors’ Role in Internationalization Process

Family enterprises are the dominant type in the population of enterprises and as such they stand out with a number of peculiarities in their management practices. One of these peculiarities is the desire of founders and leaders of family businesses to introduce their children (most often) to the problems of the firm and gradually prepare them for responsible management positions as well as for their future role as successors in management and ownership. Meanwhile, part of family businesses face the issues of their future development and growth, overcoming the limitations of local and domestic markets. The solution is most often in the internationalization of their activities. To benefit from opportunities of internationalization, however, firms need to improve their management, by acquiring new knowledge and skills necessary for their activities in foreign markets. This improvement could be successfully combined with the preparation of future successors in management and potential inheritors of the business ownership, using some of the advantages of the youth, as better receptiveness of novelties, better language training, relatively good knowledge about the world and trends in it. In this context, this paper aims to review available studies of next generation’s role in activities of family businesses and in the process of internationalization in particular, by focusing on the succession issues. Complementary objectives of the paper are: 1) to use a synthesis of current knowledge and views about the role of the next generation in analysing the results of an empirical study of internationalization process of Bulgarian family businesses and 2) to prescribe some possible directions for further research.