Abstract
Few external shocks have had as severe an impact on organisations as COVID-19. To date, research on how management can respond to such a far-reaching trigger event is lacking. Due to their economic relevance, family firms, which are typically resource-constrained and rely on idiosyncratic resource allocation behaviour, are of particular interest in this regard. Based on an inductive, multicase study of German family firms and building on rich longitudinal insights from more than 100 semistructured interviews and secondary data, we develop a novel framework explaining how an external shock such as the COVID-19 pandemic can trigger a change in family firms’ motives. Linking certain adapted motives of family firms (i.e., survival, utilisation, and opportunism) with their resource allocation behaviour during the crisis (in terms of resource preservation, resource recombination, and reliance on social boundary resources), we reveal how digital innovation (digital process innovation, digital product innovation, and digital business model innovation) originates as a result of a process of entrepreneurial action.