Cornell Case Competition for Family Ownership


Next Competition Date: Feb 14-15, 2025, Cornell Tech, NYC

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.


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The Case

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.


Registration Is Now Open

Please note: The Cornell team for the February 2025 case competition will be selected through an internal competition. If you are from Cornell, please do not register directly below. The deadline to register for the internal competition is Nov. 4, 2024. More information here: https://cglink.me/2ee/r2272670.

For all other schools, please note that we will only accept one team per school on a first come, first served basis. Subsequent teams that register will be waitlisted. We have 8 slots for teams this year. Once they are filled, remaining teams will be waitlisted. Application Deadline: December 15, 2024, 5pm

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.