The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into how thesuccessors of family-owned manufacturing SMEs view and manageinnovativeness. Research into company take-overs mainly focuses on largecompanies and little is known about innovativeness in research on familyownedbusinesses, often SMEs. This paper presents findings from ten companysuccessions, five of which describe family successions and five external ones.The paper shows that there is little difference in how various types of successorview and manage innovativeness. A successor is chosen with care and this alsoinfluences the view and management of innovativeness: other criteria seem toapply in the succession and any (radical) changes can only be introduced if anumber of contextual factors are managed properly.