ISB to set up centre for family businesses

The Indian School of Business (ISB) Thursday announced setting up of a centre for family enterprises to conduct research on family run businesses.

The Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise will be formally launched during fifth 5th Asian invitational conference on family business, scheduled Feb 6-8 at ISB here.

ISB currently has a chair for family business and wealth management.

Dean Ajit Rangnekar told reporters that the centre would conduct research and training to make family businesses stronger as a study shows that they have a low survival rate beyond second and third generations.

"The centre will look into the causes of this. It will also do case studies of how some family run businesses grow stronger after generation changes," he said.

The conference with the theme 'Continuity of family businesses across generations' is a platform for the exchange of insights and knowledge among diverse stakeholders in the field of family business.

The sub-themes of the conference includes leadership challenges in building large businesses, building family bonding, managing succession and next generation, owners expectations and growth of family business and grooming and building family and businesses as institutions.

Several family business luminaries from the Asia region and international experts in the field will be among the speakers.

The report of a study done on Indian family businesses was released on the occasion. Professor Kavil Ramachandran said the study found that significant differences exist across generations. He said though members of business families are together as families, this bond is not strong in the area of business operations. The study found that there are crucial policy gaps across generations, which adversely affect togetherness.

He said there was a need to recognise and fill inter-generational differences. "Indian family business often do not realise the need for policies and so do not make them," says the study while underlining the need for them to proactively develop policies and processes