Entrepreneurial thinking as a key factor of family business success

Many entrepreneurs are really visionary game changers who believe both in their missions and values. These types of entrepreneurs use their mindsets and essential entrepreneurial thinking to build successful family businesses. The aim of this paper is to describe this special mindset, which manifests itself in entrepreneurial thinking, and offer a solution to help successors in family businesses to refresh and improve the core businesses given to them. Design thinking might be used as a method for helping successors to recognize new business opportunities and refresh the core business, creating new visions and values. This paper is divided into the following sections: introduction, the creation and definition of entrepreneur missions and values. A short description of the entrepreneurial thinking is in the third part. Part four focuses on the problem of succession in family businesses. In part five, the reason why the design thinking might be the right tool to help solve this problem is explained. Finally, a conclusion is offered. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.