This book provides recent ideas, insights, facts, evidence, frameworks, and perspectives on how and why entrepreneurial families are successful over generations. The book focuses on how families successfully implement entrepreneurship across generations. That success, it argues, requires entrepreneurship at the level of the family, not only in the businesses the family owns and manages. Written by noted academics and consultants who are authorities on family entrepreneurship, the chapters provide a comprehensive exploration of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurial families, their motivations, how they behave over time, and, suggestions for how business families can encourage and sustain entrepreneurship. This comprehensive look at family entrepreneurship will serve as a fundamental reference text for family business consultants, owners, and scholars.

Matt R. Allen is Associate Professor in the Entrepreneurship Division, and family fellow in the Institute for Family Entrepreneurship at Babson College. His expertise is in the effective management of human capital within entrepreneurial environments, especially family enterprises. His current research is focused on the role of the family in the entrepreneurial process and how to build entrepreneurialcapability across generations. Matt designed and is leading the Family Entrepreneurship Amplifier program, a one-of-a-kind education program for business families that engages students and their families in the learning process in order to build entrepreneurial capability. 

William B. Gartner is the Bertarelli Foundation Distinguished Professor of Family Entrepreneurship at Babson College. He is recognized as a leading scholar in the field of entrepreneurship by such awards as: the 2005 Swedish Entrepreneurship Foundation International Award for outstanding contributions to entrepreneurship and small business research; the 2013 Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division Foundational Paper Award; and the 2016 Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award. His scholarship spans a wide array of topics in the entrepreneurship field: entrepreneurship as practice, the social construction of the future, varieties of value creation and appropriation, translating entrepreneurship across cultures and countries, the poetics of exchange, the demographics of entrepreneurial families, and, the nature of legacy in family entrepreneurship.