Succession & Entrepreneurship through Acquisition

Succession & Entrepreneurship-through-Acquisition

Business succession is a central and firmly established field of research in the context of family business research. Not only in Germany, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are currently facing the challenge that their current owners are looking for a succession solution due to their age, but no family-internal succession option can be realized. More and more companies are leaving family hands and looking for external solutions. Against this backdrop, the concept of entrepreneurship through acquisition (EtA) is becoming increasingly relevant. EtA describes the process in which entrepreneurs take over existing companies and develop them further through their activities, rather than founding a new company.

This emerging field of research combines classic start-up research with the specifics of company acquisition and continuation. This raises a variety of research questions, which the working group is investigating both theoretically and conceptually as well as empirically:

• What individual and institutional factors influence the success of business succession?
• How do start-up processes differ from takeover processes in terms of dynamics, risks, and opportunities?
• What role do financing structures (e.g., search funds), investor models, and M&A markets play in facilitating succession?
• How do successors shape transformation processes in established companies and combine tradition with innovation?
• Which political, economic, and social conditions promote or inhibit successful business succession?

With its research, the Succession & Entrepreneurship-through-Acquisition working group contributes to deepening the understanding of succession processes in small and medium-sized enterprises and opens up new perspectives on entrepreneurial takeovers as an independent form of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship. The aim is to provide impetus for research, practice, and economic policy through scientific debate.

Contributions on this topic:

Duetsch, S., & Oestreich, M. (2025). Linking entrepreneurship to external business successions: a semi-systematic review of the existing family-external business succession literature in the family firm and entrepreneurship research. Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, 1-22. doi.org/10.1080/08276331.2025.2478674
Freiling, J., & Oestreich, M. (2022). Ist die Unternehmensnachfolge nach dem Search-Fund-Modell eine Option für Mitteleuropa? Entrepreneurial Business and Economics Review 10 (2): 81–96. doi.org/10.15678/EBER.2022.100205
Freiling, J., & Pöschl, A. (2020). Familienexterne Unternehmensnachfolge: der Fall von Management-Buy-Ins. Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship. doi.org/10.1080/08276331.2020.1771812
Poeschl, A. & Freiling, J. (2019). Der Weg zu einem neuen unternehmerischen Gleichgewicht in Unternehmensnachfolgeprozessen. Journal of Organizational Change Management 33 (1): 157–180. doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-04-2019-0107