Abstract
This article is the result of the collaboration between fifteen Italian family businesses and the Competence Area on Entrepreneurship and Family Business of MIP, the Business School of the Politecnico di Milano. The research has been framed around a time period of three years and aimed at providing a normative model of best practices for managing the succession process in family businesses. The succession is a key factor that strongly affects the survival of family businesses. However, in spite of this, the extant literature on this topic is fragmented. The model proposed in this article tries to overcome this gap of the literature and offers a systemic view of the succession process and a set of practices for successfully managing it. The formulation of the model is based on an in-depth review of the literature on family business, combined with an empirical study that allowed to validate the literature-based best practices for managing succession and to identify new ones. The multiple case-study research methodology gives scientific validity to the model, although future researches based on quantitative methodologies will be needed in order to support the statistical generalization of the emerged empirical evidence.