At the heart of things: The role of the “married” couple in entrepreneurship and family business

The paper aims to develop an expanded conceptualisation of copreneurship, locating it within the family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship.

The paper draws upon entrepreneurship and family business literatures in order to identify the concept of copreneurship within both traditions.

Copreneurship has been examined by researchers in both fields and, although there are limitations to the current understanding, it clearly represents an important phenomenon, and the role of spousal support in entrepreneurship being identified as particularly significant.

By locating copreneurship as a key link between the entrepreneurship and family business literatures, this paper offers a useful basis for framing subsequent work using insight from both fields.

Copreneurship, and other forms of small family firms, represent a high proportion of new ventures and there are, therefore, considerable policy benefits to gaining greater understanding of the dynamics of such ventures.

The paper offers an expanded conceptualisation of copreneurship which both increases its utility as a construct and highlight key definitional issues for future research.