Enterprise families wrestle with questions that outside advisors cannot really answer on their behalf: Do we have a good family-member successor lined up? Who leads next? How do we involve the passive family-owner group? How do we keep passive owners engaged rather than sidelined? Should we split the wealth or keep it together? How do we untangle financial and non-financial family considerations? Do we optimize for short-term returns or long-term impact? These questions cut close to the family’s identity and are difficult to outsource. Working through them together is what builds the trust and shared meaning that sustain collective action across generations.

The stakes reach well beyond any one family. Enterprise families are a quiet engine of the wider economy: they drive economic growth, employment, philanthropic capital, start-up finance, technological innovation, and even the performance of capital markets. And yet the odds do not seem to be in their favor. Many enterprise families still fail to preserve their financial and non-financial wealth across multiple generations, regardless of the country, tax laws, or economic cycle. The cause is rarely the business itself; it is usually the family. Strained relationships and dynamics that obstruct sound joint decision-making can do more damage than any market downturn. Yet the counterexamples are real: families such as the Rockefellers, now seven generations in, show that strong family governance and durable social capital can sustain an enterprise family across generations.

Public debate about wealth and enterprise families tends to be polarized and oversimplified. Academic research on family businesses, by contrast, has taken a curiously different path. Although the family is the one variable that theoretically distinguishes a family enterprise from any other firm, scholarship has so far paid little attention to the family as a unit of analysis, focusing overwhelmingly on the business system instead.

The VU Center for Enterprise Family Research (CEFR) was founded to address precisely this. We study enterprises at the family level and aim to become the reference platform for preparing the rising generation, siblings or cousins who inherit family assets, to become responsible owners who can determine for themselves the role they want to play in overseeing and managing the enterprise family. As a research platform, CEFR sits deliberately at the intersection of scholarship and practice, combining academic rigor with genuine executive collaboration between scholars and practitioners.

We investigate why many enterprise families (fail to) maintain generational success across multiple generations. We then translate those root causes into practical guidance and insights into what it takes to ensure the continuation of family enterprises. CEFR is building a curriculum for established and emerging enterprise-family leaders and their rising-generation family members, equipping them to navigate the distinct challenges of transgenerational enterprise families. We bring stimulating learning, pragmatic skills development, accessible faculty, and excellent networking opportunities to the welcoming VU Amsterdam campus.

As an expertise centre, CEFR is designed for siblings, cousins, and advisors from enterprise families who lead or manage the family business, family office, family foundation, or family investments. Through the CEFR platform, they will gain the confidence to weigh different approaches to shared challenges, the judgment to choose what fits their own family, and a working understanding of the roles and responsibilities across ownership, the family council, the board, and the family office.

CEFR is led by researchers and practitioners with deep experience in the field. Scientific Director Prof. Dr. Maarten de Groot and Associate Director Dr. Lotte Glaser combine hands-on experience working with enterprise families and family offices with rigorous qualitative and quantitative research expertise.