Roots for the Future: Heritage, Purpose, and Mind in Italian Centenary Firms

One of the main challenges businesses face today is preserving a distinct corporate identity while addressing key societal concerns, such as sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility. For centenary companies, this challenge is even greater due to their corporate heritage: an often-underestimated asset that embodies historical continuity, identity, credibility, and collective knowledge. As such, it offers a strong foundation for tackling contemporary issues (Riviezzo et al., 2016; Urde et al., 2007). When combined with a clear sense of corporate purpose and a well-defined corporate mind, corporate heritage can become a powerful driver of social innovation. Corporate heritage ensures authenticity and identity continuity, while corporate purpose transcends profits, shaping a firm’s broader mission (Basu, 2017; Gartenberg, Prat, & Serafeim, 2019). Corporate mind reflects the shared values and ethical standards that guide a firm’s decisions and behaviors (Dennett, 1971; Searle, 2010). Together, corporate heritage, corporate purpose, and corporate mind enable centenary companies to align their strategies with societal needs, promoting initiatives that integrate their economic goals with their cultural, environmental, and community commitments. In Italy, which has a rich tradition of long-standing businesses, centenary companies are central to promoting social innovation. In this economic, cultural, and technological context, many heritage-rich firms, often family owned, have leveraged their legacy as a strategic asset to tackle business challenges while remaining rooted in their local and cultural identity. Studying such firms, the literature shows, offers valuable insights into how traditional organizations can preserve their identity while adapting to modern society’s expectation of them (De Massis et al., 2013). In this study, we aimed to analyze how Italian centenary companies leverage their heritage, purpose, and shared corporate mindset to drive social innovation. A comparative case study of four prominent firms—Antica Dolceria Bonajuto, Marchesi Antinori, Amarelli Liquirizia, and Manifatture Sigaro Toscano—was conducted, exploring how historical value is integrated into socially conscious initiatives, particularly in environmental sustainability and local economic development. Our study contributes to the discourse on corporate social responsibility (CSR), highlighting centenary firms’ unique potential to use their corporate heritage to promote social innovation. We adopted a hybrid approach that combined deductive and inductive reasoning. The theoretical framework guided the case analysis deductively, offering a conceptual structure to identify the key dimensions of corporate heritage, corporate mind, and corporate purpose (Dubois & Gadde, 2002; Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 1989). Concurrently, the qualitative analysis allowed for inductive insights to emerge, illustrating how firms blend their traditional business values with contemporary societal expectations (Gioia et al., 2013; Miles et al., 2014). Our findings reveal that leveraging historical assets, when guided by a clear purpose and shared ethical values, enhances firms’ ability to address today’s challenges. Centenary firms not only grow more resilient and relevant over time but also lead by example, aligning their economic goals with societal welfare and offering a model for integrating profitability with purposeful social contributions (De Massis et al., 2021; Riviezzo et al., 2022; Urde et al., 2007).