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This chapter explores how next-generation women owners participate and contribute to their families’ single-family offices (SFOs). To examine this issue, we analyze 12 SFOs from Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific.

Our results show that daughters actively participate in philanthropic efforts, community-based entrepreneurship projects and family council meetings. Yet, they are rarely involved in the SFO investment committees or board of directors. Moreover, female next gens are less likely to propose new business ventures to the family council or SFO board of directors. Apparently, daughters are not as encouraged as sons to create their own for-profit start-up. Family inclusive values and culture, parental influence and/or sibling’s encouragement, the presence of female role models, and the existence of a gender-diverse SFO top management team positively influence the way women owners relate to and connect into the SFO.

We realize, too, that when women owners are not involved in the family council, less family-related activities are promoted. Occasional family-related activities are associated with the family council limited operation and null vision of intergenerational wealth transfer. Further findings are grouped in five major themes: (1) Motivation to set up the SFO, (2) SFO activities, (3) New business ventures, (4) SFO governance structures and (5) SFO strategy and vision. Based on the SFO strategy, vision and activities, we identified four types of SFOs: The SFO as a Legacy School, as an Entrepreneurship School, as a Community School, and as a Decorative-Investment Arm.

The economic development of Taiwan, from a poor island colony to a world leader in electronic hardware manufacturing, has been spectacular. This study shows that the success of Taiwan may be largely attributed to the synergistic combination of two separate factors: (1) the utilization of unique social capital inherent in the Chinese family entrepreneurs, and (2) the institutional support from the government and other entities, such as Technology Parks, for the creation of scientific and technical knowledge and, most important, for the diffusion and exploitation of technology-based opportunities by these family businesses.

Personal political connections with politicians have positive contribution to the abnormal returns of firms (Hillman, Zardkoohi, & Bierman, 1999; Chung, 2006; Dinc, 2005; Faccio, 2006; Morck, Wolfenzon, & Yeung, 2005; Imai, 2006). Business owners and executives have incentives to invest in political connections because such relationship may enable their firms to gain access to key information not available to the competitors. However, the impact of political connections on the behaviors of firms has only received scant interest in the literature (Hillman, Withers, & Collins, 2009).

The objective of this research is to examine the impact of formal and informal political connections on the scope of family business diversification. We focus on family business because of their unique access to family ties or family social capital to achieve business objectives (Sharma, 2004; Steier, 2003). We test our hypotheses using panel data from 35 Taiwan-based family business groups from 1988 to 2002. Our analysis shows that the informal political connections possessed by the parent generation owners of family business groups are better predictors of family business diversification than the informal political connections established by the children generations owners. This result complements the resource dependence theory by suggesting that durable and non-transferable political connections possessed by family leaders have a unique effect in the corporate decision to diversify. Additionally, the personal ties between politicians and parent generation family leaders are “sticky.” They cannot be easily succeeded by the younger generations.

Entrepreneurship is essential for the growth of both individual firms and overall economies. Through the creativity entrepreneurship fosters, new products, processes, and organizations emerge. Entrepreneurship provides the necessary flexibility and dynamism for responding to new market opportunities and challenges. Accordingly, it is important to understand entrepreneurship – how it takes place, the characteristics of entrepreneurs, the factors that encourage or discourage it, and how it differs across countries. Fortunately, research on entrepreneurship is active across the social sciences. This volume presents a collection of chapters that report on recent studies across a variety of areas, and the material reflects the vibrancy of both this emerging field of study and its subject area – entrepreneurship.