Family businesses should be among the boldest innovators. They have long-term orientation, patient capital, and trusted networks, the ingredients most companies try to manufacture through strategy decks and investor updates. On paper, they should be the ones experimenting, adapting, and shaping the next chapter of their industries.

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Yet in practice, innovation inside family enterprises often feels heavier than it should. Projects stall, budgets shift back to the core, and new ideas struggle to find space. Not because of a lack of talent or ambition, but because the very strengths that make family businesses resilient can quietly turn into barriers when change becomes necessary.

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Identity, capital, and stewardship - the forces that hold a family enterprise together - can also limit its ability to evolve when they remain unexamined. Successors inherit not only responsibility, but also these structural tensions. Understanding them is often the turning point between innovation that survives and innovation that fades.

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This report explores these dynamics through the lens of eight years of work with successors and legacy businesses. It breaks down why innovation efforts fail, what patterns appear across industries, and how family enterprises can build innovation units and ventures that last.

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