Generational succession represents the most critical transition in the lifecycle of a family firm (Calabrò, 2021; Poccia, 2015). In Italy, 92% of family SMEs will face one in the coming years, yet only 18% have a structured plan(Lozzi, 2025). Despite an extensive body of academic literature on the topic, this knowledge remains fragmented, inaccessible, and rarely translated into tools that firm owners can practically use (Baltazar et al., 2025; Romano & D’Allura, 2025). At the same time, strategic design, a discipline developed to support organisations in navigating complex, systemic, and human-centred challenges, has been designed almost exclusively for large organisations with substantial resources, dedicated research functions, and established design cultures (Micheli et al., 2018). Family SMEs operate in a fundamentally different condition, characterised by limited resources, no prior design culture, and deep resistance to external intervention (Millers & Gaile-Sarkane, 2021; Wrigley et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2021).
This thesis investigates whether and how strategic design can be introduced into family SMEs, and whether it can concretely support these firms during the process of generational succession. The research is structured around two extensive literature reviews, one on strategic design and one on family business and succession, followed by three rounds of semi-structured interviews, including professors, succession experts, consultants, and family firm owners in the Piedmont region. A co-creation process conducted over more than a month with a manufacturing micro-firm approaching its third-generation succession produced a realistic, field-tested representation of how succession actually unfolds in practice, and shaped the translation of strategic design principles into a management system grounded simultaneously in academic literature and organisational reality.
The result is a digital platform that translates this research into a structured support system for family firms navigating generational transition. The platform combines a five-phase succession process grounded in both strategic design and family business literature, a library of strategic design tools adapted for a non-design audience, a diagnostic system, and an interactive process canvas. The project sets out to demonstrate that strategic design can be meaningfully introduced into contexts distant from design culture, that it can be translated, adapted, and co-developed with its intended users to become a concrete and accessible instrument for family firms navigating one of the most complex moments in their lifecycle.

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