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While many parents extol the virtues of big professional dreams, those who maintain a family business often encourage their children to keep family tradition alive. Family businesses are everywhere, with many different aspects depending on their type and context. These facts aren’t lost on Enderun Colleges, which now offers an entrepreneurship program focused on family enterprises.

By partnering with world-class international institutions like Alain Ducasse Formation in France and the Les Roches International School of Hotel Management in Switzerland, Enderun is on the cutting edge of comprehensive education in global environments.

The emphasis on family enterprises of its Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship was a practical choice for Enderun. Rodriguez says, “If you tackle the problems of family enterprises, business education becomes very attractive. Some good entrepreneurship programs in Manila do not allow the student to work on a thesis that engages the family enterprise. We thought to adopt the opposite philosophy.”

Helping students develop business concepts that involve family businesses is the core idea behind Enderun’s entrepreneurship focus. “We make sure that our students, upon graduation, are not just imitating their family business, but are doing something new about it,” says Rodriguez. “They should be able to expand it, ... reengineer it and professionalize it.”

Enderun’s entrepreneurship program is currently the fastest growing among its offerings, since it started its School of Business and Entrepreneurship in 2009.

Enderun tackles concepts that are unlikely to show up in other business schools and programs. Rodriguez emphasizes one such concept: “A very essential part of our curriculum for entrepreneurship is family succession. It’s a central issue of every family enterprise. Who inherits ownership and leadership? How is the organizational structure maintained? We dwell on that to some extent.”

The Entrepreneurship program is a completely unfettered free-elective system, allowing students to take individual courses tailored exactly to their family businesses, regardless of its parent program in Enderun.

Enderun also underscores the need for students step back, and critique what’s happening in their family business. This hands-on approach that maximizes a student’s immediate business background, rather than sidestepping it, is what sets Enderun’s program apart. Mentor-apprentice internships with successful entrepreneurs serve to cement the practical lessons. “We encourage teachers to teach the science, rather than the art, of entrepreneurship,” stresses Rodriguez.

With this program, Enderun has a lot to offer, not just to entrepreneurship students, but to families and family enterprises as well.