Purpose: The importance of relational capital for the university has grown enormously in recent years. In fact, relational capital allows universities to promote and emphasize the effectiveness of the third mission. The purpose of this paper is to propose a case study involving an Italian university that recently set up a new research observatory, and, thanks to its success, succeeded in enhancing its relational capital.Design/methodology/approach: The authors adopted an action research approach to analyze the case study. Consistently, the authors followed the analysis, diagnosis, and intervention phases. First, the authors focused on the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the process through which the university created relational capital, and finally, the authors proposed solutions to improve the process.Findings: This case study shows that the creation of relation capital for the host university was the result of a process of transfer and transformation of the individual relationships of the observatory’s promoters.Originality/value: This paper contributes to filling a significant gap in the literature on relational capital and universities and provides useful insights into how these organizations can encourage its creation. It also allows scholars, managers, and politicians involved in higher education to gain a greater understanding of this relevant topic.

The number of women involved in the ownership, management and direction of family businesses has been growing in the last few years. However, women's presence has been sometimes described as ‘invisible’, without influence in decision-making, and women's efforts are not always properly recognized and rewarded in terms of job titles and salaries. Women in this type of situation have a marginal role and they are still quite numerous. This paper aims to identify some typical women's profiles sharing a minor role in their family firms. These profiles are described using three variables: women's role in the family firm; activities they actually carry out in the family firm; the type of remuneration they received. Each profile is outlined drawing both from the literature on this subject, as well as from interviews with women involved in their family firms with different roles and responsibilities. Interviewed women are all involved in small and medium-sized firms located in Italy, in the Marche region. Three women's profiles are described: completely invisible women, figurehead women and manager women. They show possible roles women can play within their family firms when the leader is a man. Moreover, they underline that women's minor role in the family firms is not always the result of stereotyping and gender discrimination. Women in fact are not always ‘victims’ and forced to operate in a secondary position. The socio-cultural context plays a very important role but women's personal reasons are equally important, as they lead women to accept a certain profile rather than another.

Several empirical investigations indicate that family firms are more innovative under the founding generation’s leadership and become less innovative in later stages, while others state the opposite. Within this debate, limited attention has been devoted to understanding how intra-family succession might be an opportunity to maintain or improve family firms’ innovativeness. This paper aims to explore how family firms’ innovativeness may evolve from the first to the second generation and understand which conditions may favour or hamper this change. A qualitative approach based on a multiple case study was adopted, conducting seven face-to-face semi-structured interviews with founders and successors that formed the basis of four case studies. The results reveal four different dynamics that characterise how a first-generation family firm’s innovation capacities are or are not passed on to the second generation: decline, transformation, consolidation and preservation. Findings also show that these dynamics depend on the founders and successors’ approaches towards innovation. To better depict differences between them, we propose a typology of founders (lone innovator, collaborative innovator and orchestrator innovator) and successors (prodigal son, game changer, talent scout, faithful disciple) and explain how they influence the evolution of innovation from the founder generation to the next.

Micro-enterprises are important drivers of economic growth and women entrepreneurs are key developers of these businesses. It is therefore important to understand factors that affect their existence and their success or failure. In this study, our aim is to describe some typical women—family relationship profiles, characterized by families playing a central role in influencing the choices, behaviours and activities of women entrepreneurs, in positive and negative ways. We address the research question by adopting a qualitative approach based on multiple case studies—an approach that is particularly well suited to assessing people’s experiences in depth. Our data collection is based on direct interviews with Italian women entrepreneurs through a semi-structured questionnaire, guided by a checklist. This analysis helps us to better focus on one of the key issues facing women entrepreneurs—namely, balancing family life with their work and professional aspirations. Clearly, it is important to know and understand the role of the family in women’s entrepreneurial experiences to interpret the reasons why women-owned businesses succeed or fail, as family ties will inevitably have an impact on their performance. The analysis presented in this paper demonstrates the existence of a strong bond between female entrepreneurs and their families. We conclude that female entrepreneurial experiences—that is, women’s individual choices to become entrepreneurs and the characteristics of their businesses—cannot be truly understood if attention is not additionally paid to the “family” dimension. This article is published as part of a collection on the role of women in management and the workplace.

Gender inequality in the division of family work is vastly corroborated and work–family balance is an important topic in the female entrepreneurship field of research. Even if work–family balance should be a necessity indiscriminately perceived by all women and men who have a paid job, it is a particularly pertinent issue for women, called to find equilibrium between work and family. This study analyses the situation of men and women entrepreneurs in order to investigate how the economic crisis affected the work–family balance. A survey was conducted on a sample of 218 men and women sole-proprietors. Findings show that the work–family balance of women entrepreneurs does not seem to have been particularly affected by the crisis. However, some differences between men and women remain. Concerning balance, as expected, only women stated that they personally take care of the house and family. Different perceptions of the crisis between men and women also emerged, as a consequence of gender stereotypes. Women entrepreneurs have greater difficulty in having an internal psychological balance of the double role than men, who are more involved in the implementation of external balance and focus on corporate and social provisions.

This paper focuses on family businesses’ opinions and perspectives concerning soft issues raised by the succession process and their willingness to involve an external advisor. An empirical research study based on multiple case studies was carried out. Through 25 direct interviews with the incumbent and/or successor, 15 Italian family businesses were analysed that have experienced or are going through a succession process and have involved, or have chosen not to involve, external advisors. Results underline that many family businesses are aware of the relevance of soft issues for a successful outcome of succession. However, this awareness does not always turn into a real request for advice. Family businesses often consider succession planning a private affair and prefer not to share it with external subjects. Instead, family businesses that have asked for external advisors have often complained, saying that they are mainly focused on hard issues and forget that managing soft issues is often the real key to effective succession.