Managing Intellectual Capital in Family Small Business Generational Turnover

In small businesses, an institutional overlap, mutually influenceable, is created among the firm, the entrepreneur and the family’s members. Such characteristics can be a point of strength and source of competitive advantage for small family businesses, but at the same time they make small family businesses vulnerable to changes, including that of the generational turnover. Generational turnover assumes particular importance in the present European economic context, mostly characterized by small businesses. That is why such particular moment of the business life has been the subject of an intense debate both among the operators in the economic context and in the academic world. In the family business where the entrepreneur figure is predominant, the generational turnover corresponds to a very critical phase for business continuity. The family business survival to generational turnover depends on various factors, such as: the ability of the business organizational structure to conform to the new entrepreneurial figure; the inevitable individual oppositions to organizational change; the inadequate identification of the aspects on which the business competitive advantage was really based; the management loss of focusing on clear and shared objectives following the death of the former subject of reference of the firm. The substitution of such focal figure, source and repository of a vast and variegated intangible property, can inevitably cause a loss of distinctive competences, which can jeopardize the continuity of the value creation process. It follows that one of the greatest obstacles to be faced in the generational turnover consists in the difficulty in maintaining, transferring and developing vast and composite knowledge property from the entrepreneur to the successor. Assumption of the present work is the recognition, at this point shared, that the economic equilibrium of ones business depends on its ability to create, manage and develop knowledge, competences and relationships with its environment. Managing such intangibles assets presumes the adoption of a perspective which considers intellectual capital determinant in business success. With reference to such initial assumption, the study aims to examine the importance of intellectual capital in the realization of the generational turnover in small family businesses. Specifically, after examining the processes of creation, accumulation and transfer of the intellectual capital, the research sets to develop, even if with its limitations, a conceptual model for managing the knowledge in the generational turnover processes in small family businesses. The analysis of the results of the generation and accumulation of the cognitive resources is considered functional to adequately plan the entrance of the successors and the activities to carry out in the course of time in order to facilitate the integration in the business.