WHO WE ARE - HISTORY AND MISSION

The AIDAF-EY Chair in Strategic Management of Family Business in memory of Alberto Falck was born in 2014 from the experience of the previous "AIDAF-Alberto Falck Chair of Family Business Strategy", established in 2004 by Bocconi University with the aim to spread the consciousness about the importance of Family Business in the most developed economies and in the academic system as a leading research field. The idea to promote a chair focused on Family Business at Bocconi University emerged from the study of the characteristics of the Italian entrepreneurial system, mainly composed of family-owned, small-medium companies.

The AIDAF-EY Chair, the first in Italy focused on Family Business, is currently financed by AIDAF (Italian Family Firms Association), EY (Ernst&Young), one of the largest professional services networks in the world, and by a group of leading Italian family firms. The goal of the Chair is to develop research, teaching and participation in institutional activities related to family business.

The mission of the AIDAF-EY Chair is to develop a portfolio of research projects in family businesses that are characterized by rigor and relevance, which can be translated into publications, conferences, seminars and other dissemination activities in order to spread the acquired knowledge to an audience as varied as possible made up of entrepreneurs, managers, scholars, researchers and policy-makers. The ultimate goal is to help ensure that the AIDAF-EY Chair and Bocconi University establish themselves as a fundamental point of reference on these issues both nationally and internationally.

The AIDAF-EY Chair has contributed to the publication of academic articles, books and case studies as well as to the organization of national and international conferences and workshops. Between 2004 and 2020, its researchers published around 70 articles in international journals.

With the support of AIDAF and Unicredit group, the AIDAF-EY Chair established in 2009 the first Observatory (AUB, acronym for AIDAF-Unicredit-Bocconi) on all Italian family businesses with turnover exceeding 20 million euros. The AUB Observatory is currently the most complete and extensive survey available in Italy on Italian family-controlled companies, and has the ambitious goal of representing the state of the art in terms of empirical knowledge on the country's main family businesses and to offer selected comparisons with other European countries.