Center for Family Enterprise researcher Myung-Seon "Lydia" Song wins FFI Best Doctoral Dissertation Award
Myung-Seon "Lydia" Song, postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Family Enterprise at the House of Innovation, has received the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Family Firm Institute (FFI), one of the world's leading organizations dedicated to advancing knowledge in family business and family enterprise.
The award recognizes Myung-Seon "Lydia" Song’s dissertation, Three Essays on Family Office: Examining the Relationship between Family Firms and Direct Entrepreneurial Investments of Single Family Offices.
The dissertation explores an underexamined question: how family firms and the single family offices (SFOs) established to serve them influence one another, and how that relationship shapes investment decisions.
Single family offices support many of the world’s best-known business families, including the Waltons (Walmart), the Pritzkers (Hyatt), the Dells (Dell Technologies), and the Wertheimers (Chanel). Despite their scale and influence, SFOs remain one of the least studied parts of family enterprise because they are privately held and rarely disclose their activities.
Lydia’s dissertation helps address that gap. It draws on a proprietary, hand-collected dataset covering 265 U.S. family offices and analyzes 176,896 entrepreneurial investments made between 2010 and 2019.
The dissertation consists of three studies. The first examines whether family firms encourage their SFOs to diversify through entrepreneurial investments or to invest in areas closer to the family business. It also shows how this relationship varies depending on the generation managing the SFO and whether the family still owns its original firm.
The second study proposes that SFOs function as external innovation platforms, giving family firms advantages in identifying acquisition targets through direct investments. The third compares how SFOs and non-family investors, such as venture capital funds and angel investor groups, differ in their approaches to socially responsible investing.
“This is a very prestigious award, and it reflects an important research area for our Center: the role of family offices in entrepreneurship and innovation,” says Professor Mattias Nordqvist, Director of the Center for Family Enterprise at SSE.
Lydia will receive the award at the FFI Annual Global Conference in New York in October 2026.
“Family offices sit at the intersection of family and business, but we still know relatively little about how they invest. I hope this research gives family offices, and the family firms behind them, a clearer understanding of that relationship,” says Lydia Song, postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Family Enterprise.
Founded in 2022 with geneorous support from SEB and five Nordic family offices, family enterprises, and foundations, the Center for Family Enterprise builds research-based knowledge on family business and family office practice across the Nordics and beyond. Lydia’s award highlights the quality of research produced within the Center.
