Fly Solo, Then Return Home? Offspring's Entrepreneurship Experience and their Future As Family Business Successors

How does early‐career entrepreneurship experience of family business offspring affect their likelihood of eventually taking over the established family firm? Considering family business succession as a dual‐agency process, we draw on human capital theory and opportunity cost logic to theorize how the same early‐career experience can have divergent implications for succession by simultaneously shaping parental preferences and offspring's choice. Using early‐career entrepreneurship as a revealing case, we analyse parent–child successions involving 8274 potential successors in Sweden between 2001 and 2019 and find that entrepreneurship experience positively affects a child's succession likelihood. The strength of this effect, in turn, depends on the entrepreneurial offspring's opportunity costs of succession, which are shaped by characteristics of their venture and the family business.