The Cornell Case Competition for Family Ownership offers current graduate students a unique opportunity to examine a family enterprise case up close, alongside the family themselves. Take the collaborative elements of a hackathon, combine the analytical elements of a case competition, and include the top MBA students in the world and you have the Cornell Case Competition for Families Ownership. This is a first of its kind event for students and family business experts to demonstrate their understanding of the issues critical to family enterprise. This event will bring together students from leading business schools, select advisors, faculty, and family enterprise leaders sharing their challenges first hand to receive real-time feedback and ideas concerning the future of their enterprise.
The Cornell Case Competition for Family Ownership was launched in November 2022 and has since been held twice. In last year’s competition, six teams competed over two days with a live case using SmugMug/Flickr as our subject. This was a real-world experience with a complex business. Currently, we are planning for our third case competition, which will take place in February 2025.
The case will feature family members and senior leadership of an active global family-owned enterprise. The case is written by a Cornell faculty member, under the guidance of the Smith Family Business Initiative. The first part of the case will be sent to teams 7 days prior to the competition.
Teams will have one week to prepare their Part A which will be presented on Day One of the competition. Part B will be presented to students after the first round is complete. Teams will have the remainder of the evening and the next morning to complete their case analysis.
Please note: The Cornell team for the February 2025 case competition will be selected through an internal competition in the fall. If you are a Cornell student, please do not use the registration link above. We will circulate information on the internal competition in the fall.
Interested in participating, sponsoring, or judging? Please contact Daniel Van Der Vliet, the John and Dyan Smith Executive Director of Family Business at dgv9@cornell.edu to learn more.