
CeFEO’s 2025 roundup brings together our 20th anniversary year research highlights, shared through the launch of the Spotlight platform. The collection spans four themes: succession and ownership continuity, strategy and innovation under uncertainty, leadership and the human side of enterprising families, and responsible ownership and impact. Each section points readers to the full Spotlight articles to dive deeper.
CeFEO’s 2025 roundup brings together our 20th anniversary year research highlights, shared through the launch of the Spotlight platform. The collection spans four themes: succession and ownership continuity, strategy and innovation under uncertainty, leadership and the human side of enterprising families, and responsible ownership and impact. Each section points readers to the full Spotlight articles to dive deeper.
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.
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:
Together, these contributions highlight a practical and scholarly message: continuity depends as much on structures and preparation as it does on meaning and belonging.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
What connects these topics is the same core question: how do owners make decisions when economic logic, identity, and responsibility pull in different directions?
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


Spotlight is an innovative online family business magazine designed to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and the real-world needs of practitioners, owners, and policymakers.
Drawing on the latest findings from the Centre for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership (CeFEO) at Jönköping International Business School, Spotlight delivers insightful, accessible summaries of key research topics.
Our mission is to keep the family business community informed and empowered by offering actionable insights, expert analyses, and forward-thinking strategies that enhance business leadership and ownership practices for long-term success.
Spotlight is generously supported by the WIFU Foundation, which promotes research, education, and dialogue in the field of family business. This partnership enables us to continue bridging academic insights and real-world practice for the advancement of responsible family entrepreneurship and ownership.
The Centre for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership (CeFEO) at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) is a leading research centre in family business and ownership studies.
Since its foundation in 2005, CeFEO follows the steering idea of combining “Academic Excellence and Practical Relevance”. This mission means to combine rigorous academic research at the international frontier, which the creation and diffusion of knowledge that is practically relevant for companies, organizations and individual stakeholders with an interest in ownership and family business issues. With over 50 scholars and 30 affiliated researchers, CeFEO seeks a double through research, education, and outreach, both in the academic community and in the broader society.
The WIFU Foundation is a non-profit organization established in 2009 to promote research, education, and the transfer of knowledge in the field of family entrepreneurship. Supported by over 80 family businesses from German-speaking countries, the Foundation advances the creation and dissemination of high-quality, practice-oriented knowledge about family enterprises and entrepreneurial families. The WIFU Foundation fosters an open, confidential exchange among family businesses and scholars, bridging theory and practice. Its mission is guided by values of trust, respect, openness, authenticity, and intergenerational dialogue, ensuring a vibrant and future-oriented community for sustainable family entrepreneurship.
