For Schulze Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation Kimberly Eddleston, family business isn't simply a research area. It's a way of life.
Long before she became one of the world's leading scholars on family enterprise, Eddleston grew up surrounded by entrepreneurship. Family businesses were woven into daily life, shaping dinner table conversations, career paths, and the way she viewed success.
“Family business probably chose me,” Eddleston says.
At one point, her extended family owned nine businesses. She started her first venture with her brother at age nine, worked in several family-owned companies throughout her youth, and remains involved in multiple family enterprises today. Entrepreneurship runs deep in her family. Her husband owns a business, her son built and sold a startup while attending Northeastern, and her daughter is currently running a venture of her own.
Those experiences gave Eddleston something that would later distinguish her work as a scholar: firsthand knowledge of both the opportunities and the challenges that emerge when family and business intersect.
“I think I've seen it all—the good, the bad, the ugly,” she says.
Today, Eddleston is internationally recognized for her research on family business, entrepreneurship, succession, gender, and governance. Her work has helped reshape how academics, business leaders, and families think about family enterprises. But her path to becoming a leading authority began with a simple realization: the prevailing wisdom about family businesses didn't match what she had witnessed throughout her life.
Challenging conventional wisdom
While pursuing her doctorate at the University of Connecticut, Eddleston worked alongside renowned strategy scholar Michael Lubatkin, one of the most influential researchers in his field. At the time, much of the academic conversation around family businesses focused on their shortcomings.
“The punchline of his articles was basically, ‘If you want the business to survive, get the family out,'” she recalls.
That conclusion felt fundamentally at odds with her own experience.
Growing up, she had seen families serve as the foundation of successful businesses. Family members provided labor, expertise, financial support, and a long-term commitment that many organizations struggle to replicate. Rather than viewing family involvement as a liability, she saw it as a source of strength.
Together with fellow doctoral student and longtime collaborator Franz Kellermanns, Eddleston began exploring a different perspective. Their research focused on understanding how family relationships, trust, stewardship, and shared values could contribute to business success.
The work resonated. Business owners weren't asking how to remove family from the equation. They wanted to know how to build stronger families and stronger businesses simultaneously.
“They wanted to hear, how do I keep this a family business?” Eddleston says. “How do I keep my family healthy? How do I keep my business healthy? How do I create a dynasty? How do I create intergenerational wealth?” Those questions would define much of her career.
Over the years, she helped establish a more balanced and nuanced understanding of family enterprise—one that recognizes both the strengths and challenges of family involvement. Her research has examined topics ranging from succession planning and governance to conflict management and entrepreneurship, always with an eye toward helping families navigate the realities they face.
What makes her work unique is that it rarely begins in a theoretical vacuum. “A lot of my research questions come from things I've seen in my family,” Eddleston says.
Where business meets psychology
Family businesses operate differently from other organizations because business decisions rarely stay confined to the boardroom. A disagreement about strategy may also involve decades of family history. A succession decision can affect relationships between parents and children. A conflict over ownership may carry emotional weight far beyond financial considerations. For Eddleston, understanding those human dynamics is essential.
“A lot of the business success rises and falls with the health of the family,” she says.
That belief has led her to explore the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of entrepreneurship and family enterprise. Her work examines how trust, identity, communication, conflict, and relationships shape organizational outcomes. She often points out that family involvement fuels entrepreneurship from the very beginning. Parents model entrepreneurial behavior. Relatives provide startup capital. Spouses contribute labor. Children help however they can.
“We know that businesses that have family involvement actually have a higher survival rate,” Eddleston says.
In the early stages of a business, that informality can be a tremendous advantage. Family members step in wherever they are needed. They trust one another. They share a common purpose. However, growth introduces new challenges.
As businesses become larger and more complex, informal arrangements that once fueled success can become obstacles. Family firms must learn how to balance personal relationships with professional expectations, maintain trust while introducing accountability, and preserve entrepreneurial spirit while building formal systems.
“The hard part is maintaining that,” Eddleston says.
One of the most difficult transitions occurs as businesses move into later generations. A common vision and shared sacrifice often unite founders, and their children may inherit that perspective. By the third generation, however, ownership often expands to cousins who grew up in different households with different values, priorities, and experiences. Helping families navigate those transitions has become a major focus of Eddleston's work.
The most successful family enterprises, she says, approach governance intentionally. They create family councils, establish constitutions, develop clear expectations, and invest in maintaining relationships across generations. “They work at it every single day,” she says. “The oldest businesses in the world, most of them are under family control and ownership. There's a reason for that.”
Bringing family business to life in the classroom
Eddleston's passion for family enterprise extends far beyond research. At D'Amore-McKim, she has developed innovative courses that help students understand the human side of business through experience, reflection, and conversation. One of her most well-known courses, Examining Family Business Through Film, uses movies and television to explore family dynamics, governance, leadership, and succession. The course has attracted national attention and has been featured in publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
The course gained particular visibility during the popularity of HBO's Succession, as journalists sought her perspective on how accurately the series portrayed the realities of family-controlled enterprises. For Eddleston, however, the most meaningful teaching often happens in a different classroom.
Her Next Generation Family Business course brings together students from family enterprises worldwide. Many are preparing to become future leaders, owners, or board members within their families' organizations. The course operates more like a workshop than a traditional lecture. Students interview founders, create newsletters for their businesses, and engage in conversations with family members about topics they may have never discussed before.
“Every single week is around a topic, and I expect them to bring it back to their family business,” Eddleston says.
The impact often extends well beyond graduation. Former students regularly reconnect with her years later when they encounter challenges discussed in class. Some are navigating succession. Others are dealing with governance issues or family conflict. Many simply want guidance from someone who understands what they're experiencing.
One of the lessons Eddleston hopes students carry with them is that they are not alone. Family businesses may differ in size, industry, culture, or geography, but she believes many face remarkably similar challenges. “Things that people think are unusual—they're not,” she says.
Building a lasting legacy
When Eddleston reflects on the impact of her career, one achievement stands above the rest.
“That'll be my legacy,” she says, of FamilyBusiness.org.
Supported by Richard Schulze, founder of Best Buy, the platform has grown into the world's leading website dedicated to family business education and support. Together with its sister site, EIX, it reaches millions of readers each year. The mission is simple but ambitious: translate research into practical knowledge that entrepreneurs and family business leaders can use. The platform brings together insights from leading academic journals, researchers, and practitioners, making evidence-based guidance accessible to audiences around the world.
For Eddleston, its success represents something larger than readership numbers. It embodies her belief that research should serve people. The website helps families address difficult conversations, navigate complex decisions, and recognize that many of their challenges are shared by others.
“A lot of these articles send them the message that they're not alone,” she says.
That commitment to practical impact also extends to her role as successor author of one of the country's leading entrepreneurship textbooks, helping shape how future generations learn about entrepreneurship and innovation. Both efforts reflect the same goal that has guided her career from the beginning: helping people build businesses that endure. After decades of research, teaching, and engagement with family enterprises, Eddleston remains fascinated by the subject that first captured her attention.
The reason, she says, is simple. Business may provide the structure, strategy, and financial outcomes. But family businesses add something else.
“You've got the business,” she says, “but then you have all the heart.”
And for Eddleston, understanding that intersection of business and heart has become a life's work.