Portfolio entrepreneurship refers to the simultaneous identification and utilization of two or more business opportunities, and is an important means for family firms to address the dual challenges of intergenerational inheritance and upgrading. In fact, the essence of entrepreneurship is the process of identifying and utilizing opportunities, in which the cognition and ability shaped by entrepreneurs’ own experiences play an important role. In the context of inheritance, the second generation is the main family entrepreneur, so studying the antecedents of portfolio entrepreneurship requires examining the second generation’s growth experiences. Given this, our study proposes a model of the second generation’s growth experiences, industry prosperity and portfolio entrepreneurship, and constructs the hypothesis based on the imprinting theory.

The study empirically tests the hypothesis using an ordinal logistic regression on a sample of 215 Chinese listed family firms during 2004—2016. The results show that the second generation with the experience of witnessing parental entrepreneurial process, studying abroad and working outside family firms will form values, beliefs and norms distinct from their parents, resulting in strong entrepreneurial intentions. At the same time, they possess strong information identification ability, resource acquisition ability and risk-taking ability, thus they are able to promote portfolio entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the lower industry prosperity will reduce the second generation’s identification with family firms, make them have a stronger entrepreneurial intention, and promote them to carry out entrepreneurial learning, strengthen their entrepreneurship ability, thus promote the portfolio entrepreneurship. Additionally, the second generation with the above growth experiences is more willing to enter high prosperity industries.

The study makes several theoretical contributions: First, it focuses on the relationship between the second generation’s growth experiences and portfolio entrepreneurship, which enriches the antecedent of portfolio entrepreneurship. Second, it explains the formation of entrepreneurs’ cognition and ability from the historical perspective, breaking through the limitations of previous static studies. Third, it finds that the impact of the second generation’s imprint varies with industry prosperity, which not only expands the application scope of the imprinting theory, but also enriches the contextual factors of family entrepreneurship.The practical implications are that: First, family firms need to develop appropriate training plans for successors to nurture transgenerational entrepreneurship. Second, decision-makers of family firms should avoid the constraints of the imprint formed by experiences.