Cinzia Dessì
Researcher
The importance of the family business.
The research of Cinzia Dessì.
The researcher’s article
Small and medium-sized businesses: competitiveness and interpersonal relationships.
Not all the small and medium-sized family businesses have given way to big commercial activities. Many of them were able to be competitive, withstanding the appeal of the metropolises of trade.
The relation with the audience, the direct knowledge of the clients has been the winning card for the small familiar businesses. A distinctive element, emerging among the various services offered by the large companies.
If you tell a story, then everything changes.
Listen to Cinzia Dessì
Before creating a theory is necessary to collect relevant data, test the hypothesis and valuate them. The small familiar businesses and the predisposition to innovation can be understood a through the stories told in the course of time and shared from generation to generation. In the first stories, focused upon the foundation, are hidden many clues on the leading of the business and the future, on the chance of success.

Cinzia Dessì
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Business Creation, Project Management, Business Social Responsibility.
Research field in reference to the short film: generational transition in family-run companies.
Cinzia Dessì is a professor in Entrepreneurship and Business Creation, Project Management, Business Social Responsibility at University of Cagliari. The relationship between Bruno and Lorenzo inside the family business tells about one of the researches which inspired the web series.
Download scientific papers
Every company is born with a purpose, a characteristic that its founders pursue over time, through a passing of the baton to the new generation that establishes continuity with the past. This is a very important moment where the business philosophy finds its application in the practices of its successors.
There are cases in which, however, the passing of the baton is accompanied by a phase of rupture that marks a caesura, sometimes sharp, between past and present, between old and new ways of understanding the conduct of the family business.
In both cases, whether we remain anchored to tradition or open ourselves to the emerging trends, every family business has important values at its base.
This passage is fundamental, because it concerns the survival of the enterprise itself and that’s why the values on which the management of a company rests must be solid. Like a trademark, corporate values explain why a company carries out a specific activity and how it believes it can make, through its work, an effective improvement in the social fabric. The same values are them a winning card inside the competitive context dominated by large companies. In fact, the studies show how the tenacity and the resistance of small and medium-sized family businesses lies precisely in the values that qualify the product and the service offered to the customer, intertwining with the philosophy of the company, that the public, recognising himself, hugs it in its turn.
The Impact of Storytelling on Innovation: a Multi Case Study
Academy 2015
How small family-owned businesses may compete with retail superstores
JSBED 2014
The Impact of Shared Stories on Family Firm Innovation: A Multicase Study
Kammerlander 2015
Read more on the same theme
Michela Floris – Le imprese familiari hanno molto da insegnare.
Le imprese familiari rappresentano il 90% circa dei modelli imprenditoriali diffusi sul territorio globale e, pertanto, rappresentano la spina dorsale dell’economia.
Discover now the in-depth videos for the first episode.
