Smith Family Business Initiative Welcome Reception and Dinner

Open to the public with special guests, alumni, students and owners invited. 

Highlight new SFBI research projects:

• Family Matters: A Proposed Research Agenda on Family-Business interactions in Emerging Markets by Professor Wesley Sine (Johnson)
• Production Efficiency at Family-owned Floricultural Firms: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Ethiopia by Professors Hyuncheol Bryant Kim (PAM, College of Human Ecology) and Hyunseob Kim (Johnson)

Featured speaker: Eric Allyn, Welch-Allyn (C)

Welch Allyn, one of the foremost medical products manufacturers, has been in family ownership for 100 years and four generations. A global leader in the innovation of diagnostic devices, they have also remained a family owned business, until recently. With significant changes in the industry and consolidation in the global marketplace, the Welch Allyn Board of Directors, together with the Allyn family, decided to sell its interest in Welch Allyn to Hill-Rom for $2.05 billion. “It was an agonizing decision,” states Eric Allyn, Chairman of the Board of Directors, and great-grandson of William Noah Allyn, who founded the company with Dr. Francis Welch in 1915. Mr. Allyn will share the story of Welch-Allyn, how the decision was arrived at to sell the family business, and what might come next for the family and business.