An article on the resilience of historic wine producers in Italy and Australia published on the learning platform www.familybusiness.org – the reference knowledge repository for family business leaders, consultants and also for academics looking for practical resources shared by academia’s foremost family business professors and experts  – has recently earned Prof. Alfredo De Massis one the 2020 Schulze awards in the Research Insights category. This prestigious award is dedicated to articles that have the merit of bridging the gap between academic research and the needs of practitioners. 

Prof. De Massis stresses the value of this recognition for his field of research: “I also consider it a sort of tribute to the work we carry on at the Unibz Center for Family Business Management at the NOI Techpark because it shows – coming from such an authoritative, practice-oriented scientific institution as the EIX, funded by the Schulze Family Foundation - that our research can be useful to help firms dealing with real-life problems. Combining academic rigor with impact for practice is our ultimate goal”.

The subject of the article, which channels useful information for those who want to understand how to make their businesses more resilient to external and unexpected shocks, is the development of resilience by wine entrepreneurs in Italy and Australia through generations. “It is the result of a qualitative research for which we conducted in-depth interviews with 17 members of as many entrepreneurial families active in the wine industry who have a history of at least 50 years behind them”, De Massis explains, “after talking to them we were able to distill four practices that can lead a company to greater resilience.” 

The prize for this award is $2,000. Its peculiarity though is that the authors do not receive this amount of money on their personal bank accounts but must make it available to young scholars or to an academic institution. “This is thought in order to encourage the emergence of new research directions and the knowledge transfer”, says De Massis. 

(zil)