How are entrepreneurial family businesses sustained over time?

Since the launch of this project in 2005, scholars from over 42 renowned academic institutions from around the world have worked with over 100 business families to identify key insights through an action research program. Over the years, findings from this research have been shared through publications for academics and practitioners. The STEP project and related publications such as this Booklet aim to generate usable knowledge on practices that enable building of entrepreneurial capacity across generations of family enterprises. This second STEP Global Booklet features thirteen chapters authored by thirty-three scholars. Insights are drawn from sixteen transgenerational family enterprises based in ten countries located in five continents-Asia (Hong Kong, India and Malaysia), Europe (Belgium and UK), South America (Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela), Africa (Uganda), and North America (USA). Collectively, these sixteen family firms have been in business for over a thousand years. Based on the most recent figures available to us, they generated annual revenues of over 1.9 billion USD and provided employment to over 41,000 individuals. With such depth and breadth of experiences, it is indeed a privilege to learn from these notable enterprises that deal with the paradoxes of family and business on a daily basis, while preserving their core and expanding their competencies and boundaries. The contributions of people, processes, and systems over time are evident as we cluster the cases to inform the non-family member influences; development of next generation and professionalization of the enterprise; building of community, alliances and networks; and the comprehensive systems of transgenerational entrepreneurship. The clusters are not impermeable but simply our attempt to systematize the contents of this booklet and draw some insights from the whole. In some instances a chapter addresses multiple topics and thus could be placed in another cluster. Chapter tables summarize the booklet's structure and identifies the topics covered in each section. A brief summary of the key insights follows.