Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices - STEP

Leading Australian family businesses are being approached to join ACFB scholars in the STEP Project, which addresses one of the greatest challenges faced by business families worldwide - growth and continuity that spans many generations.

The STEP Project is a leading edge research initiative that allows business families and academics to learn from one another. The research focuses on understanding how families continue to grow and create wealth across many generations. STEP refers to this capability as Transgenerational Entrepreneurship. The STEP Project seeks to generate knowledge and solutions that have immediate impact and personal application to business families.

Founding Member Institutions

• Bond University, Australia
• Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India
• Kyungpook, National University, Korea
• Nankai University, Tianjin, P.R. China
• National University of Singapore
• Seoul National University Of Technology, Korea
• Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan
• Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, P.R. China
• Queensland University of Technology, Australia
• Waseda University, Japan

The goal of the STEP Project is to understand the transgenerational nature of business families and groups, assessing how they create new economic activity across time.

Recent studies have acknowledged that families:

• Control between 60% and 90% of business in nearly every nation
• Contribute more than 70% of private jobs
• Have a dominant impact on business world wide
• Most likely function as the largest single source of start-up capital.

STEP is viewed as a global research consortium with leading universities from four regions of the world - Europe, Latin America, Pacific Rim, and North America. The European STEP Project began in the summer of 2005 at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy with seven founding member institutions: Babson College, ESADE, HEC, University St. Gallen, University Witten/ Herdecke, Universita Bocconi, and Jonkoping International Business School.

For more information contact Dr Justin Craig