3rd MCI Family Business Forum provides exciting impulses at World Café for family businesses

Only recently, MCI and the Family Business Center hosted the third Family Business Forum to promote creative dialog and exchange between the academic and the business world. The focus of this exemplary meeting of family business owners, professors, and students lies on providing a change of perspective, innovation, and incentives for professionalization.

As part of the World Café, almost 60 students were given the opportunity to discuss family-run business topics with the participating entrepreneurs. The topics addressed included questions of management, internationalization, succession, innovation, growth, conflict, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial action. Both students and business representatives valued in particular the new perspectives gained and the opportunities arising from this exchange of entrepreneurial and academic points of view. The participants also appreciated the diversity of approaches suggested along with possible solutions provided.

Entrepreneur Manfred Pletzer puts it in a nutshell: “To be confronted with the candid perspective of students is both pleasant and refreshing. This change of perspective alone gives entrepreneurs an incentive and a new outlook: indeed, I picked up many new ideas.”

“MCI is especially committed to providing a link between the worlds of academia and business and creating conditions from which all participants can profit. The benefits for our students of gaining insight into practice as well as of the openness of participating entrepreneurs are, in fact, manifold,” as Anita Zehrer, head of the MCI Family Business Center, emphasizes.

MCI would like to thank the following entrepreneurs for their support and participation:

• Claudia Berghofer, ADLER
• Mario Gerber, Gerber Hotels
• Elisabeth Hauser, Stanglwirt Hotel
• Christine Maier, Arnold Digitaldruck
• Simon Meinschad, hollu Systemhygiene
• Susanne Neuhauser, Idealtours
• Manfred Pletzer, PLETZER Group
• Wolfgang Sief, SIKO
• Andrea Speckbacher, Eurogast Speckbacher
• Gerhard Stocker, STASTO Automation