The Centre for Entrepreneurship collaborates with Babson College, the leading entrepreneurship school in the US, to launch a research consortium in Asia. Schools around the Pacific Rim, including China, Singapore, Australia, Korea, and others, are invited to discuss this research project at CUHK on June 27-28, 2007.

In many of our most productive countries—the United States, Germany, Spain, India and China, to name just a few—families control up to 90 percent of the businesses and contribute more than 50 percent of the gross domestic product. In the emerging economies, families are the developmental foundation for new business and future prosperity. Until now, the focus on ensuring prosperity through family businesses was to help them preserve wealth and survive from one generation to the next. Through the STEP Project families will come to understand the requirements for long-run growth and productivity that can generate prosperity for many generations to come. A critical facet of all thriving businesses and growing economies is no secret: Entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is about “the new” – new products, new processes, new capabilities, new markets, new business models, new ventures. The prosperity challenge is thus clear. If family businesses are the social and economic bedrock of our communities and countries, then how do they nurture the imagination and foresight, and foster the boldness and calculated risk taking that allows them to generate “the new”? The STEP Project is uncovering the answers to this challenge on a global scale by bringing together successful multigenerational family firms worldwide with the most respected business experts and academic institutions in Europe, Latin America, the Pacific Rim and North America. These research collaborations will produce a detailed picture of the practices of family businesses that thrive from one generation to the next. It will compare the strategies from one area of the world with another, giving family firms new, innovative directions to consider.

Perhaps even more importantly, each year regional summits will bring the families and researchers together to discuss the findings, challenges facing family firms, and new directions for exploration. This worldwide network will also have various global gatherings for academics and families to capture the innovation and initiatives of the world’s most important business model—the family firm. As a first of its kind initiative, the STEP Project thus holds the potential to revolutionize views on global prosperity.

We are glad that Ernst & Young, Prudential, and Wall Street Journal Asia are sponsoring this project.

Building on the success of a previous forum in October 2006, this forum will again invite family businesses, professionals, and academics to learn from expert speakers and exchange their views on various issues concerning family enterprises. We will be able to take advantage of the conference organized for the STEP project because experts from all over Asia will be able to share their view and expertise with attendants. We have produced the tentative programme for this one-day event. We are glad that Ernst & Young, Prudential, Wall Street Journal Asia, and probably more organizations will sponsor or support this event.

In this event held in 20 October 2006, founders, owners, and members of closely-held and family businesses gathered at this forum. They received our summary of the latest academic research on family and closely-held businesses and were stimulated to learn though discussions with fellow family entrepreneurs. A summary of the findings is downloadable below.

The press conference held before this forum was extremely well-received and all major press covered this event and our findings. We are glad that several companies, associations, and media were supportive to this event.