Old, intelligent and beautiful. Strategies balancing innovation and tradition in century-old family firms

Strategy is about being able to select a business model so that the firm achieves an appropriate degree of fit between the inside and the outside (consistency) while exploiting virtuous circles across individual ingredients (complementarities). Firms who survive for a very long time (i.e. one, two or more centuries) prove to be able to dynamically choose and adapt their business models so to possess strategic, organizational and operational capabilities that enable them to do so, and these capabilities can be seen as a sort of ‘intelligence’ in balancing tradition and innovation. This paper, of exploratory nature, looks at three ultra-centenarian family firms in Italy and, taking a cue from the study of multiple intelligences on individuals, tries to identify the key dimensions of such intelligence (organizational, strategic, craftsmanship, narrative, relational, creative) and how these dimensions show consistency and activate complementarities that are peculiar to their family-based nature