Global Center for Family Enterprise

We examine the theory, conceptual underpinnings, and implications of sustainability for family enterprises. We apply a multi-dimensional approach on (corporate) sustainability and provide insights on how family enterprises can generate long-term value for their owners and stakeholders fostering companies’ longevity. Thereby, we take responsible leadership, business, innovation practices, and forward-looking training activities as the basis for family enterprises’ sustainable development. More specifically, we aim to better understand how family enterprises contribute to solving the grand societal challenges of the 21st century, promote gender equality, and how they effectively pursue responsible business activities. We focus also our interest on investigating topics such as sustainable entrepreneurship. We aim to understand how families can sustain their business for the long-run and across generations and develop the competences to adapt to structural and environmental changes in terms of adjusting their human capital, cognitive skills, and corporate governance structure to changing environmental demands.

New technologies, e.g., artificial intelligence (AI), digital technologies and block chain technology, are considered to be path-breaking drivers of organizational change and innovation in family enterprises. New ground-breaking technologies pose significant new challenges for organization in research and business, particularly with regard to responsible leadership, business and innovation practices, and social integrity. Family enterprises face the challenge to efficiently react to and shape these new technologies. We are interested in examining how family enterprises implement strategies, structures, and employee training using their unique competences to leverage the potential arising from these new technologies.
For instance, AI might lead to faster and more accurate decisions of managers while also having the ability to transform interactions between humans and AI within teams and organizations. We are interested in investigating how family enterprises can effectively deploy path-breaking technologies and aim to generate knowledge to how family enterprises of the 21st may look like. For example, we provide insights on managerial practices and strategies that help family enterprises to leverage disruptive technological changes, design technology-based forms of collaboration, and to effectively establish human-machine interaction.

Family enterprises are characterized by a unique governance structure. Those enterprises need to sustain competitive advantages in rapidly changing business environments with high uncertainty and time pressure. While the specific governance constellations of family enterprises having ownership and management within the family might diminish e.g., owners’ impatience and managerial short-termism, and agency costs, issues may arise due to company succession, nepotism, stakeholder interactions, and family conflicts. We are thus interested in understanding how governance (i.e., corporate governance, ownership and family governance) can be strategically employed to achieve competitive advantage and effective resource deployment within family enterprises. Hence, we investigate for instance topics such as strategic ownership, ownership competence, corporate and contract governance, and contract negotiations to ensure family enterprises’ long-term success.