When we started Spotlight by CeFEO, we had a clear purpose in mind: to take the research produced within our centre and make it useful to the people who live family business every day — owners, next-generation members, advisors, and policymakers. Today we publish our 200th article. This feels like the right moment to stop, look at what we have built, and say something about where we are going.

Two hundred summaries is not a small number. Each one begins as an academic paper — dense, technical, written for other scholars — and becomes a short, readable piece that a family business owner can finish over a coffee and act on the same week. This is the work we set out to do, and, in line with the mission of CeFEO, it is our attempt at academic excellence and practical relevance at the same time. We have never seen these two as a trade-off. The whole point of Spotlight is that good research and useful research are the same research, explained differently.

Moreover, the milestone is not really about the number. It is about the conversation behind it. Over 200 articles, the questions that family business owners actually bring to us — about succession, about governance, about keeping a family together across generations, about growth, about ownership, about how to behave when a crisis hits — have met the evidence we and our colleagues have spent years producing. We see practitioners not as an audience to be lectured, but as partners and collaborators. Spotlight is the channel through which that exchange happens at scale, and reaching 200 articles tells us the channel is working.

A word on the people behind these summaries. Every article rests on the work of researchers — many CeFEO members and their colleagues across the field — who chose to study questions that are difficult to study and slow to answer. Translating their work into Spotlight is, in a sense, the easy part. The hard part is the research itself, and we want the milestone to belong to them as much as to us.

Once again, 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.

What comes next

Two things, in parallel.

First, we continue to do what we have always done: as our CeFEO authors publish new studies, we bring them to Spotlight. New research reaches you here, regularly, in the practitioner-friendly form you have come to expect.

Second we are going back to the beginning. Relatedly to the milestone, we have started producing summaries for every article in the history of CeFEO, not only the recent ones. At the moment we have 70 more studies, written between 2005 and 2015, that will be added to Spotlight over the coming period. These are studies that shaped our centre and the field, and many of them have never been made accessible to a practitioner audience. Bringing them into Spotlight is our way to preserve, share, and diffuse the legacy of our research centre,. so that the knowledge produced two decades ago is as easy to find, and as useful, as the research published this year.

Finding what you need

With 200 articles already published and many more on the way, the natural question is how to find the piece that answers your question. Two tools make this simple. You can interrogate Spotty, our AI chatbot, in plain language and let it point you to the right article, or simply give you the answer directly, drawing on the full CeFEO body of academic and practical knowledge. Or you can use our advanced search, powered by Claude, to explore the archive by topic, author, or question.

For special needs or requests reach out to us through the contact form. We read every message.

Two hundred down. The next two hundred, and the twenty years of research behind them, are already on their way.

Massimo Baù
Director of CeFEO and Editor of Spotlight