New Publication on How Family Firms Use Governance Mechanisms to Mitigate the Risks of Ecosystems

Dieudonnee Cobben, together with Petra Neesen, Diana Rus and Nadine Roijakkers explored how family firms, acting as ecosystem orchestrators, mitigate perceived relational and performance risk via the use of governance mechanisms. Relying on data from a Belgian family firm that initiated an ecosystem in the healthcare sector, the authors find that family-firms use formal and informal governance mechanisms in a complementary fashion to deal with relational and performance risk.

The article was published open access and can be found here.

Abstract:

This study aims to increase our under- standing of how family firms, acting as ecosystem orchestrators, mitigate perceived relational and performance risk in ecosystems via the use of governance mechanisms. We use the ecosystem governance literature to understand whether family firms’ characteristics lead to a unique governance approach in an ecosystem setting. Our findings and theoretical implications are threefold; (1) formal and informal governance mechanisms act as complements to mitigate relational and performance risks; (2) the choice of governance mechanisms differs for relational and performance risk; (3) changes in perceived risk over time result in shifts in the relative dominance of for- mal/informal governance mechanisms.

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