Founding Director of the Australian Centre for Family Business (ACFB) Professor Ken Moores recently shared Australian research findings with researchers and practitioners at the Asia Pacific Regional Summit of the Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Process (STEP) hosted by I-Shou University in Taiwan.
The ACFB is a founding partner of the STEP project and is working with some of Australia’s leading families in business in the action research project. The Taiwan Summit brought together leading families in business and scholars from the region to share experiences and knowledge about how to address the challenges unique to their business sector.
About STEP: The Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices was launched in 2005 when leading European institutes in the field of family enterprise research assembled under the leadership of the renowned Babson College to undertake a unique project. The founding partners include the Center for Family Business at the University of St . Gallen (Switzerland), ESADE business School (Spain), the HEC in Paris (France), Bocconi Universita in Milan (Italy) and Jönköping International business School (Sweden). Since then the project has grown significantly, both in Europe and in the Pacific Region as well as in South and Central America, now involving 33 partner universities with over 125 academics and over 75 family enterprises.
Each partner university enters into a research partnership with selected entrepreneur families. Detailed case studies are produced which not only go into the project database but can also be fed back to the companies themselves based on the logic of action research. This means that the companies involved can make use of the results for their own discussion of family strategy and development.
The families and researchers involved get together at regular intervals in their regions for a “STEP summit”. Here companies and academics have the opportunity to share ideas, discuss research results and learn from each other within an atmosphere of trust.
This promotes international networking as well as allowing participants to combine personal experience with theoretical reflection. The first worldwide summit was held in Boston/USA in 2010.