FAME - FAMily businEss sustainability and growth

FAMily BusinEss Sustainability and Growth.

A former project helping SME Family Business (FB) owners and/or managers to cope with the complex challenges of the imposing generational transition, the INSIST project, produced country reports on the partner countries’ SME FB systems and the findings proved to be much more significant than anticipated. The results of Insist research, outreaching much beyond the scope of that project can be boiled down in two major outcomes:

• There is an increasing need for appropriate SME FB-mentor trainings with special focus on soft skills, hard knowledge and competences in the countries, but such courses are essentially missing. This conclusion originated another ongoing VET project, called TRUST-ME, targeting to produce VET teaching modules for fast-track SME FB-mentor training.
• During the implementation of the project Insist partners realised that a very dynamic development of the FB research is evolving rapidly in Europe. Family Businesses (FB), giving an overwhelming contribution to the countries’ GDPs (above 70%!), are endangered without having external support helping them develop a sustainable strategy in general and manage a velvet GT in particular.

In the Family Business Sustainability and Growth Project (FAME) members of the collating group organised the collection, the review and the analysis of the available literature in English, Hungarian and Polish language on the subject and prepared synthesised summaries thereof. This was a specific type of preparatory research. The results of collating served as the theoretical and conceptual foundation of the FAME project, and in this capacity, it provided the curriculum developers of the individual teaching modules with intellectual inputs. Thus, module developers could obtain a general overview on the literature surveyed also with the relationship between the individual modules.

IO6 Work-Based Learning plan is a preparatory FAME project output for a long term objective, a common thinking about WBL which doesn't appear in the project’s main implementation activities but opens the door for future cooperation. The original project proposal summarises an initial approach to WBL founded on the engagement of Associate Partners. Budapest Business School (BBS) and the Cracow University of Economics Cracow (CUE) invited organisations to be Associate Partners in the FAME project and to conduct preparatory analysis to assess the potential development and implementation of WBL. Leeds Beckett University (LBU) was tasked with drafting a review of the process and an indication of the plans to develop WBL in the future.