2025 has been a special year for us at the Centre for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership (CeFEO) at Jönköping International Business School. Founded in 2005, CeFEO turned 20, marking two decades of research on the uniqueness of family entrepreneurship and ownership, always with the ambition to combine academic excellence with practical relevance.  

It has also been the year we launched Spotlight, our new digital platform that translates research into accessible, actionable insights for family business owners, leaders, advisors, and policymakers, without losing the rigor that scholars expect. Spotlight is built as a bridge: a place where research meets the real decisions families face, from succession and governance to innovation, resilience, and responsibility.  

In this editorial, I would like to offer a guided tour of the research we featured on Spotlight during 2025. The pieces below are written for both researchers and practitioners. If you are a scholar, you will find new angles, frameworks, and evidence to bring into your own work. If you advise or lead a family enterprise, you will find ideas you can test in the boardroom, the family council, and the daily operating system of the business.

1) Ownership continuity and succession as a living process

If there is one theme that keeps returning in family business research, it is that continuity is never “just” a transaction. It is a process shaped by relationships, identity, timing, and sometimes sudden shocks. Our 2025 Spotlight pieces invite us to look beyond simple succession checklists and toward how ownership and leadership actually evolve in real families.

A few starting points:

• ‍Ownership transfer across a lifetime: How do life events shape ownership transfers?‍‍
• Succession in the most difficult scenario: What happens to a family firm when its CEO-owner suddenly dies?‍
• Succession as renewal, not only replacement: What strategies help new family CEOs turn succession into renewal?‍
• Long-run endurance across generations: Can extended families successfully navigate succession, and keep control across generations?‍
• Ownership that is felt (and shared), not only held: How can family and non-family members alike feel true ownership of the business?

Together, these contributions highlight a practical and scholarly message: continuity depends as much on structures and preparation as it does on meaning and belonging.

2) Strategy, capabilities, and innovation under uncertainty

Family enterprises are often described as long-term oriented, but long-term does not mean slow or static. In 2025, several CeFEO articles focused on the capabilities that help family firms adapt, innovate, and implement strategy in turbulent environments.

If you are researching strategic renewal, dynamic capabilities, or innovation governance, or if you are a practitioner trying to balance tradition with change, these pieces are good entry points:

• Making strategy work in family firms: Can family businesses turn their unique challenges into a source of strategic advantage?
• Capabilities that build resilience and competitiveness: What makes family businesses uniquely capable of thriving in uncertain times?
• Collaboration as an engine of innovation: Can partnerships transform the way family firms innovate?
• Decision-making for radical innovation: Whose advice should CEOs trust in radical innovation?
• Digital transformation with a human lens: Early AI adoption: How can you navigate time and trust tensions?

A distinctive feature of this cluster is its attention to “how” questions: how strategy is implemented, how advice is weighed, how trust and control are balanced, and how collaboration turns into real innovation outcomes.  

3) Leadership, people, and the human side of enterprising families

Research becomes most useful when it helps us see people more clearly: founders at different life stages, leaders in crisis, boards that shape the talent system, and entrepreneurs renegotiating social expectations. The 2025 Spotlight selection includes several pieces that connect performance to human experience and organizational design.

Recommended reads:

• Resilience when crises hit: Can Family CEOs handle crises better than others?
• Age, timing, and entrepreneurial outcomes: Does Age Really Matter for Entrepreneurs?
• Board composition and venture development: What happens when male founders invite women onto their boards?
• Entrepreneurship and changing norms: Can running a business help mothers rewrite the rules of parenting?
• Why some families accept risk and others avoid it: Why do some family firms take more risks than others?

For practitioners, these insights open concrete conversations: What kind of support does the next leader need? What is the board really doing to build the workforce? How do identity and expectations affect entrepreneurial choices? For researchers, they point toward richer models where behavior is shaped by life course, governance, and socioemotional dynamics at the same time.

4) Responsible ownership: ethics, sustainability, reputation, and legacy

Family enterprise is inseparable from responsibility, not as a slogan, but as a real set of trade-offs. In 2025, we highlighted work on taxation and transgenerational duty, green innovation signals, reputation spillovers in groups, and the emotional weight of legacy and land.  

Here are the pieces to explore:

• The pull of the legacy business (even when performance suffers): Why do family firms sacrifice success to save their legacy?
• A map of what we know about tax behavior: Tax avoidance in family businesses: ethical dilemma or smart strategy?
• Duty to future generations and tax decisions: Can family businesses balance tax strategies with their duty to future generations?
• Sustainability signaling through innovation: Are green patents a smart investment for family firms?
• Protecting reputation when an affiliate misbehaves: Can firms in a group protect their reputation when one of them goes rogue?
• Emotional attachment after displacement: Can emotional ties to land and family business shape decisions after displacement?
• Beyond family firms: signals of innovation for social impact ventures: Are trademarks a hidden signal of how innovative a social venture is?

What connects these topics is the same core question: how do owners make decisions when economic logic, identity, and responsibility pull in different directions?  

An invitation to read, use, and build on these insights

If 2025 was about celebrating our roots and opening a new channel to share research through Spotlight, 2026 will be about building momentum and making the bridge even stronger. We want Spotlight to become a place where the family business community not only reads research but uses it to shape better questions, better decisions, and better collaborations across academia and practice.

Spotlight exists because we believe family business research should travel further, faster, and with more clarity. It is designed to translate rigorous work into practical knowledge that owners, advisors, and policymakers can apply, while also giving researchers a way to see how their ideas resonate outside academia. If you are new to the platform, you can start with What is Spotlight?

As we celebrate CeFEO’s 20 years, I hope these 2025 articles spark new collaborations and better conversations, in research seminars and in family boardrooms alike.

Finally, a sincere thank you to the WIFU Foundation for generously supporting Spotlight and enabling us to keep bridging academic insight and real-world practice for responsible family entrepreneurship and ownership.

Massimo Baù
Director of CeFEO and Editor of Spotlight