barriers to Innovation and its Prioritization in Entrepreneurial Family Business

Innovation is recognized as a key factor in the competitiveness of countries and firms, but firms face challenges and obstacles in achieving innovation. The purpose of this article is to identify barriers to innovation in family businesses and also to prioritize the factors identified in these types of businesses. The present study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, the data theory method is used to identify and classify barriers to innovation, and in the second stage, the pairwise comparison method is used to prioritize them.The results of the analysis indicate that the obstacles to innovation fall into 6 categories, including:Financial barriers, marketing barriers, managerial barriers, manpower barriers, knowledge barriers and environmental barriers were categorized. Manpower barriers play the most important role in increasing or decreasing productivity, which were identified as the most important barriers to innovation in the present study. Lack of skilled employees and employee resistance are some of the issues mentioned by entrepreneurs. According to the second phase of the research, which is the prioritization of barriers to innovation, the results show that the factor of manpower barriers has the greatest impact and in the second place, environmental barriers have a significant impact on the way of entrepreneurs in family businesses. Also, marketing, managerial, financial and knowledge barriers were identified as factors affecting innovation, respectively.