Family Business Voices Challenge: HEC Summer School Students Turn the Camera on Their Own Family Stories

Throughout June, the HEC Paris Dieter Schwarz Foundation Center for Family Business welcomed two cohorts of HEC Paris Summer School participants from family business backgrounds. 

Across two dedicated sessions, Cécile de Lisle, Léa Wang and Italo Parrilli introduced the Center and launched a new initiative: the Family Business Voices Challenge. The premise is simple. Students are invited to turn the lens on their own family (or another family enterprise of their choosing) and conduct a video interview that digs into the story behind the business. The pivotal moments: the hard calls, the succession tensions, the quiet decisions that determined whether a business survived to the next generation. Success stories, but also failures: the Center believes both are equally instructive, and equally rare to hear told honestly. 

Participants receive hands-on training in qualitative interviewing and research methods before setting out to capture their story. There's a competitive edge to it too. Students vie for visibility, with the best interviews earning recognition and a place in a growing, international collection of family business stories. 

Participants in the two sessions came from family businesses spanning the globe, showing an incredible and enriching cultural diversity. Yet one message came through clearly in both rooms: the challenges family businesses face — around succession, trust, identity, and legacy — are strikingly universal. 

The Center was delighted with the results of this first experimentation. Beyond the immediate value to each student, the ambition is larger: the body of interviews and data gathered will feed directly into the Center's ongoing research, helping to inform leaders, policymakers, and practitioners engaging with family enterprises worldwide. By collecting and sharing these voices, the Center hopes to deepen understanding of what makes family businesses unique, helping future generations of family business leaders learn from one another. 

A big thank you to all the HEC Academy participants for their enthusiasm and curiosity. The Center can't wait to discover the stories they bring back.